James Francken

Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The oldest sections – parts of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers – are more than three thousand years old and there are commentators who believe that they may have been written by a woman, a highly...

A flutter on the Booker Prize ought to be a tasty bet. Not this year; the favourites’ odds are short and the serious gambler will wonder if there is enough meat on the bone to justify a punt: Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (reviewed in the LRB, 5 October and 13 April) are quoted at 2-1 and 5-2 with William Hill. And...

William Strunk was a standard-bearer for the use of bold, brief English. In The Elements of Style, first published in 1918, the Cornell professor set out his rules of usage and principles of composition in the form of direct commands – ‘Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon’. ‘Omit needless words.’ ‘Do not affect a breezy manner.’ But ‘times change, and so do written communications’; a new style handbook has been published that intends to retire Strunk from service. The Elements of E-mail Style insists that in a world of electronic messages, methods of writing and editing that take ‘hours or days’ are outdated. An e-mail should have an impromptu feel and the handbook suggests how to create this effect: sentences can be truncated, for example, and capital letters ignored. A reply to an e-mail can arrive within minutes, so the tone of a message should be conversational: in an informal e-mail, a stiff greeting or stilted closing is out of place. The Elements of E-mail Style gives the reader advice on good ‘netiquette’ – the conventions for messages sent via the Internet – and explains how to have better high-tech chit-chat.’‘

China was a surprise to Auden and Isherwood – it reminded them of Surrey. Faber had commissioned them to write a travel book about the Far East early in the summer of 1937. The Japanese invaded northern China in July, capturing Peking; by August the troops had reached Shanghai and the itinerary of the book was decided. With many foreign correspondents already in Spain, Auden was confident that in China ‘we’ll have a war all of our very own.’ But Journey to a War describes how the fighting eluded them – they went to places they had been told were on the front line, but nothing was ever happening when they got there – and how they ended up in Shanghai. The freedoms of the treaty port were disappointing: they were bored by the endless receptions, garden parties and cold buffets. Isherwood came to realise that the ‘appalling atmosphere of suburban Surrey’ masked dissipation:’‘

A nervous young lawyer leaves a rabbi’s house with a sinking feeling. The arguments that he had prepared now seem hopeless: he couldn’t persuade the immigrants that their old-fashioned clothes were out of place in a New York suburb. The other Jewish inhabitants of Woodenton had warned him: ‘there’s a good healthy relationship in this town because it’s modern Jews and Protestants.’ They had known that the newcomers would be implacable: ‘Making a big thing out of suffering, so you’re going oy-oy-oy all your life, that’s common sense? … They live in the medieval ages, Eli – it’s some superstition, some rule.’ But Eli wants to accommodate the rabbi; he changes out of his new tweed suit and wanders into town in an Orthodox get-up – black hat and gabardine. In ‘Eli, the Fanatic’, the transformation helps Philip Roth connect up some of the leading themes of his short stories: anxiety, desire, separation, the odd, unsettling consequences of changes that are incomplete.’‘