Jenny Diski was born in London in 1947 and went into foster care at the age of eleven. As a teenager she spent time in psychiatric wards, before being taken in by Doris Lessing, the mother of a schoolfriend. When the LRB’s first editor, Karl Miller, met her in the early 1990s, Diski had been divorced, published five novels and was writing a column about supermarkets in the Sunday Times called ‘Off Your Trolley’. Her first piece for the LRB was a Diary about her ‘ex-Live-in-Lover’. She went on to write six more novels and more than two hundred pieces for the paper, on subjects as diverse as Roald Dahl, disgust, Jewish seafaring, Mrs Freud and Mr Thatcher, Antarctica and UFOs, but her best subject was always herself.
As Mary-Kay Wilmers wrote after Diski’s death in 2016, she ‘wasn’t self-obsessed’. When she heard that she had inoperable cancer she told the oncologist that ‘under no circumstances is anyone going to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely.’ But she embraced ‘the worst cliché of all’, the cancer diary (‘another fucking cancer diary’); seventeen entries were published in the LRB and collected after her death as In Gratitude. A selection of her essays, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, came out in 2020.
I'm not sure this is more urgent than the destruction of the NHS, or the latest recession (remember sherbet dips at primary school? It makes it hard to quail at the notion of the double dip), but I couldn't take my eyes off this week's magnates and moguls parade at the Leveson Inquiry.
There's nothing even remotely surprising about the Cruddas 'bluster', or the fact of Cameron's 'kitchen suppers'(the latest thing in cool dining) for top Tory party donors. Though the class aspect is a bit interesting. Peter Cruddas was offered the post of Tory party co-treasurer in June 2011, taking over from David Rowland, and sharing with Lord Fink, both high-level donors themselves who have both been present at dinners chez Sam and Dave. But, although Peter Cruddas's donation of £382,451 in (you guessed it) 2011 is well over the Premier League sum of £250,000 requirement for intimate invitations, Cruddas, unlike Fink and Rowland was not, as Cameron has carefully pointed out, one of the boys shooting the breeze around the prime minister's kitchen table.
As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for...
I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the cinema to see The Tree of Life. In future, I’ll be hanging on his every word. He finds Britain ‘colonialist, ludicrous and archaic’ for hanging on to the Malvinas, and refusing to try...
'This is the most humble day of my life,' Rupert Murdoch said after trying to avoid attending and before failing to give satisfactory answers to the Leveson Committee on 19 July last year. It was very probably true, at least in so far as he appears to have entirely ditched humility since that day, or moment. In January, Murdoch opened a Twitter account. For those of you not following him – why aren't you following him? – here's a taste of what you are missing. He does global politics, international finance, domestic UK and US policy on education and welfare, and jokes. Here's a joke from 19 February: 'Miracles do happen! Sun shining in London.' The sun was shining, it was a lovely day. But the following day Murdoch announced the launch of the Sun on Sunday. See? What a tease.
Jenny Diski reads from her novel Apology for the Woman Writing and answers questions at the London Review Bookshop.
Montaigne had his own literary stalker. Eight years after the Essays first appeared in 1580, he received a breathless letter from a young woman called Marie le Jars de Gournay, who declared...
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...
This is a compendious, layered novel – see ‘historiographic metafiction’ in the narratology handbook – the sort of novel that intercuts time zones and genres of fiction...
Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over...
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