Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Ingram on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 2001. Photograph: PAHelen McCrory, Mark Bonnar and Aisling Bea will also star in the production, which is written by James Graham, whose play of the story hit the West End in 2018.
* Jenny Colgan’s Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery is published by Sphere.
Augustus Carp, Esq by Henry Howarth BashfordChosen by Philip Ardagh
Although I’m a huge fan of PG Wodehouse in general and his Blandings stories in particular, and although Clive James’s series of unreliable memoirs has caused me to snort out loud in public, and after having weighed up Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men and Two Others, I’ve gone for Augustus Carp Esq, by Himself.
Subtitled “Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man”, and first published in 1924, it begins: “It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary.” Though written by Dr Henry Howarth Bashford – later Sir Henry, physician to George VI – his name did not appear in the book in his lifetime.
Carp’s nearest relative must be Pooter from Diary of a Nobody but, for me, Carp, the character and the book, surpasses Pooter and the better known classic. Here is a Sunday school superintendent, churchwarden and self-appointed president of a piety league, who religiously highlights the faults in others while constantly trying to pursue his own advancement through “good deeds”. (When falling out with those at the church of St James the Lesser, he joins the congregation of St James the Lesser Still.)
When tricked into believing that port is “a species of fruit squash imported from Portugal and known as Portugalade” he gets terrible “port-poisoning”. It all ends in tears, one of which lands on his employer, causing him to apologise –not to his employer “but to the moisture”. Why? “Because by apologising to the moisture, I was conveying to Mr Chrysostom, in the most trenchant way possible, my own opinion of his character.” Carp is, quite simply, a very British comic masterpiece.
Here, in Rist’s hands, video art becomes a format that has room for everything: painting, sculpture, technology, language, music, movement, flowing pictures, poetry, sex and premonitions of death. What could have been a cold, technical piece becomes something joyous, warm and revelatory.
In the mid-90s, I heard that artists in China were experimenting with video. The name Zhang Peili kept cropping up. I decided to get a first-hand loba negra mobi look at what the country’s artists – previously suppressed by Mao and still kept tightly in check after he died in 1976 – were doing.
Sarah Barnett, president of the Entertainment Networks Group at AMC Networks, said: “If this tale was invented you’d think it too preposterous – the fact that it is true, and told so brilliantly, makes for an unmissable three-part TV event that will entertain and enthral American audiences every bit as much as their British counterparts.
Alonso, who will be 39 this month, won the drivers’ championship with Renault in 2005 and 2006. He first drove for the team in 2003, his second season in F1, and won his first grand prix at Hungary that year. He left the sport after becoming disillusioned with an uncompetitive car at McLaren and frustrated by the dominance of Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari.
* Nina Stibbe’s Love, Nina is published by Penguin.
Agatha Runcible makes an appearance at the breakfast table in 10 Downing Street attired in Hawaiian fancy dress
David LodgeVile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Chosen by David Lodge
Choosing the author is no problem: Evelyn Waugh is the supreme master of comedy in modern English literature. But which novel: Decline and Fall? Vile Bodies? Black Mischief? Scoop? It’s a tough call, but I have a special fondness for Vile Bodies, his novel about the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. Although it was written partly out of the pain of discovering his first wife’s adultery and ends on “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”, it is continuously amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny. Many scenes and episodes, especially those that involve Colonel Blount, the eccentric father of the hero’s on-off fiancee, still make me laugh every time I reread the book. Just remembering them can provoke a smile: for instance, Agatha Runcible’s appearance at the breakfast table in 10 Downing Street attired in Hawaiian fancy dress. That scene, like so many in Waugh’s comic fiction, works because of careful preparation and timing: Agatha’s ludicrous entrance is both unexpected and yet entirely consistent with the preceding narrative, from which certain details have been deftly omitted. And the sequence still works every time I revisit the novel because the language in which it is communicated, including the dialogue, is perfectly yet economically expressive. Comedy is generated from invented situations and verbal style, and Waugh was a master of both.
