Kerraway » Books

Three cheers for Scrivener

Michael Kerr — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:02:29 +0000

It’s a rare journalist or writer these days who doesn’t use a computer. It’s a rarer one still who doesn’t find himself or herself saying, “Why can’t the people who make programs that we have to use take some account of the way we work?” Well, some of them do. For my last two books, I’ve used a Mac-only program called Scrivener, which was devised by a man named Keith after he had read a piece by Hilary Mantel about the way she works. It’s not flawless — I’ve just had a bit of trouble converting the finished book into a form that a PC at my publishers can read — but it’s by far the best writing program I’ve ever used and I would recommend it to anyone who is working on a book or on on any written project with more than one brief section. I’m nowhere near making the most of its capabilities, but I’m learning more with every book and article I work on. I could wax lyrical here about what you can do with Scrivener and how easy it is to use, but the point of the web, surely, is to save duplication with links, so I will just point you to the Scrivener site so that you can find out for yourself and download it free to have a go. No, I’m not on commission, and I paid for my own copy after playing for a while with the free download. I just think that anything that makes the job easier is worth passing on.

Peter Mandelson and Mark Twain

Michael Kerr — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:32:25 +0000

To the English-Speaking Union last night, after a day in which Peter Mandelson’s score-settling memoirs had been causing ructions in the Labour Party. The occasion was an evening dedicated to Mark Twain, to mark the release of his unexpurgated autobiography and its serialisation in Granta. The Canadian actor Kerry Shale, doing the readings, was thoroughly convincing in voicing both Huck Finn and Twain himself, while Twain’s role in American literature was discussed by John Freeman, editor of Granta, the playwright and critic Bonnie Greer, and Robert McCrum, associate editor of the Observer. Parts of the autobiography have appeared before, but Twain himself insisted that much of his most acerbic opinions on American life and politics be cut lest they damage his reputation. He effectively embargoed the work for a century. “Perhaps,” McCrum suggested, “Peter Mandelson should have done the same.”

Iceland’s volcano and the Brendan Voyage

Michael Kerr — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:32:54 +0000

I’ve taken this week off to get away from the office and the news and immerse myself in the archives, digging out the Telegraph’s best writing on journeys by water. But there’s no escaping that Icelandic volcano. Look at this, in a review by David Holloway of Tim Severin’s book The Brendan Voyage, published in 1978:

In brief, Mr Severin set out to do a “Kon Tiki” on behalf of St. Brendan. Medieval accounts said that the Irish Saint had gone to the “Promised Land.” An amount of circumstantial detail is supplied that could have been either the usual flummery of moral fables (dragons, giants and the like) or exact descriptions of natural phenomena observed while island-hopping across the north Atlantic. The giant smiths who threw hot rocks at Brendan, for instance, might have been an Icelandic volcano in eruption.

Writers first, godparents second

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:09:04 +0000

Sympathy for Martin Amis — accused last weekend by Anna Ford of failing to do his duty as a godparent — from AS Byatt. At the Harvill Secker day (see below), she confessed that she has been similarly neglectful. “I’m a godmother to three, and I’ve never done anything godmotherly for any of them,” she said.
In the past she had said that she felt guilty for having spent time on her writing that she could have spent with her children. Asked if she had come terms with that, she answered: “I still feel guilty. I’ve moved from feeling I’m a bad mother to feeling I’m a bad grandmother.”

Manuel Rivas and the art of signing books

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:46:40 +0000

The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man with a shock of silver-and-black hair, he manages to combine the presence of a rock star with the delivery of a poet. As he spoke, at first about his new work, Books Burn Badly — inspired, if that’s the word, by the Spanish fascists’ attempts to “save civilisation” by
consigning even Plato’s Republic to the flames — he was followed in English by Jonathan Dunne, so fluently that they seemed less writer and translator than a couple of singers who have been harmonising for years.
The other reason Rivas spent so long at the signing table was that he didn’t just squiggle his signature; with a few strokes of the back and sides of his fountain pen he turned each dedication (see above) into a little work of art.

Wild Essex, minus white stilettos

Michael Kerr — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:13:50 +0000

If the phrase “wild Essex” calls nothing more to mind than a hen party in stilettos draining bottles of Bacardi Breezer, maybe you need to read the piece Robert Macfarlane wrote for yesterday’s Review section in The Guardian. It’s what he calls an alternative account of the Essex landscape. Having travelled around Britain and Ireland for his book The Wild Places, he was invited by the BBC to make a film in which he confined his explorations to that single English county. The result is due to be screened on Wednesday. It should be worth watching.

British writers on Spain at the Cervantes Institute

Michael Kerr — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:33:52 +0000

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that fills so much travel writing about Spain. He said he would “rather die of poverty” than reinforce some of those stereotypes, among them the notion that “the real Spain is Andalusia” or that the country as a whole is fundamentally Moorish. He had no time for mysticism, and found duende “a particularly irritating concept”.
I thought he was a little unfair to newspaper travel sections, which may perpetuate some of the clichés but have also given space in recent years to those who challenge them — including himself.
But he’s right that many who go in search of the “real Spain”, a place they perceive as rural and unchanged, have failed to record and reflect the effect that immigration is having on the country. Jacobs said he had grown used to the sight of shepherds in out-of-the-way parts chattering into mobile phones. But on a walk recently in the footsteps of El Cid, he was startled to meet a shepherd who didn’t understand Spanish — he turned out to be Romanian. In Jacobs’s own corner of Andalusia, Frailes, he was living in a community that included not only Romanians but Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and Bolivians.
The conversation touched on the legacy of the Civil War, on the question of whether Spain is one country or many, and on the largely one-way movement of travel writers between Britain and Spain.
When asked why he did not write more about the Basque Country, Jacobs said that it was a lovely part of the world but that when he had last written about it he had received emails telling him that he wouldn’t be welcome to return. “On top of my Jewish-Catholic paranoia, the prospect of being threatened by a Basque is not particularly appealing.”
Someone in the audience asked why no British writers were interested in the Canary Islands, prompting Jacobs to point out that Galicia, too, had been neglected as a subject. And why, someone asked, were Spanish writers not examining the weird ways of the British as energetically as everyone from Richard Ford to Chris Stewart had reported on the Spanish.
Jacobs said: “The Spanish have taken a great interest in what the British say about them, but the British have taken no interest whatsoever in what the Spanish say about them.”
Preston noted that there was a similar imbalance in academic study. “There are Spanish academics who think they know about Britain,” he joked, “but this takes the form of wearing dicky bows.”
Judging from this one, the next couple of sessions should be worth hearing. On February 26 Professor Preston will be talking to Jason Webster (writer, among other things, of a bestseller entitled Duende) and on March 18 to Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons. For details see the Cervantes Institute website under “Cultural Events”.

Into the woods with Deakin

Michael Kerr — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:14:38 +0000

Stuck at home with a cold (and prevented from seeing Eli Paperboy Reed at the 100 Club last night), I’ve been escaping outdoors through the pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, his account of the mutually dependent relationship between man and trees. It’s partly natural history, partly travelogue and wholly delightful — a reminder of what we lost when he died in 2006 at only 63.
Here’s a a sample:

The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners. . . Beneath it in a hollow was a long-tailed field mouse and her nest. She stood her ground beside it as two or three of her young, half grown already, did just the right thing, escaping efficiently into the cover of the next-door clump of samphire. Embarrassed to have disturbed the family. . . I gently returned their roof into position, wishing there were some way of reassuring them that this was a genuine mistake and they were quite safe. The look of hurt, uncertainty and puzzlement in the mouse’s face has stayed with me. So has her courage in standing by the nest, decoying us from her young. It is salutary to be reminded of the extent of your own power and your potential for accidental brutality.

And here’s another:

I drive down Castle Cary, where the evening before had been calm, and I had witnessed a posse of badgers sauntering nonchalantly along the street beneath Lodge Hill, knocking the tops off dustbins like teenagers and rifling them, even pausing to tip over the ice-cream sign outside the newsagent’s. Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme.

E-readers: perfect for Ryanair?

Michael Kerr — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:19:23 +0000

Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be the year of the Kindle, or of whatever easier-to-use device Apple comes up with. John Naughton, in The Observer, reckons that e-readers will be particularly popular among travellers. Why? “Because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight.”

Our Just Back of the Year winner

Michael Kerr — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:06:55 +0000

One of the pieces I used in Last Call for the Dining Car was by Martyn Harris, whom I was lucky enough to commission when I was editor of the OpEd page of The Daily Telegraph. After Martyn’s death from cancer in 1996, the paper published a compilation of his work, for which Max Hastings wrote an introduction. Max said Martyn had told him several times that he, Martyn, could never do what Max had done and work as a war correspondent. Max’s response was this: “. . . it is far easier for a journalist to write about a great drama unfolding before him — a battle, an earthquake, a riot — than it is to conjure a brilliant literary souffle out of the commonplace ingredients of everyday life. . . ”

I was reminded of that remark when judging Telegraph Travel’s Just Back of the Year competition. Our top five included pieces on Mount Fuji, a ‘death’ on the Nile, the view from a window in Warsaw, and what one woman learned of Australia from a hospital bed in Melbourne. The one we chose as a winner, by Richard Lakin, was on an average day out with the family at a British beach.