Ever ones to be drawn in by a punny title and the promise of alcohol, my literati friends clubbed together last term to buy a book entitled Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist. Not long after came designer Dinah Fried’s Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals. No puns, but painstaking and aesthetically gorgeous photographic recreations of the best literary meals, from Heidi’s cheese on toast to a rather disturbing depiction of a pile of bones and rotting vegetables from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. 

The recent prevalence of these books is because, however ridiculous it may seem, the preparation and consumption of ‘A Rum of One’s Own’, ‘The Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose’ or (brace yourself) ‘The Deviled Egg Wears Prada’, like the books they are named after, hold the promise of taking you briefly out of your world and into the world of literature — and then, fairly (Jonathan) swiftly, down into the world of the very drunk. 

The link between artistic pursuits and more carnal ones is old. Since the advent of writing, food and drink (along with sex) have been among the most popular topics. 

As basic needs that also must be found and prepared, and which can, on top of that, be immensely pleasurable, we are programmed to be obsessed with what we put in our mouths. 

The most common themes in cave paintings are bison, deer and cattle: rarely are there drawings of human beings, but drawings of what we ate are everywhere. The Bible is a classic example of the use of food as a metaphor, with the forbidden fruit, the miracle of the loaves and fish, the ritual of the Eucharist, and countless more food references. This even continued into the first poetry: Old English texts tend to have a worrying (and hopefully metaphorical) obsession with cannibalism. Further back, texts such as Petronius’ Satyricon explore banqueting and feasting in indulgent detail. In art and literature, food becomes a cultural symbol of class, of race, of ideals. 

With the emergence of a literary canon, our obsession with recording what we eat has taken a turn for the meta in the creation of imaginative cookbooks based on the food eaten by literary characters. 

The world of literary cookbooks is a place where our natural obsession with food mixes with our desire to immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds. A personal favourite is Tove Jansson’s Moomins Cookbook, which is full of jam and potatoes, but there is also Dinner with Mr. Darcy, Drinking with Dickens, The Joyce of Cooking, and hundreds more. 

And it’s not only books that get their own cookbooks. There is also the Artists & Writers’ Cookbook, featuring culinary suggestions from figures such as photographer Man Ray, who details his ideal “Menu for a Dadaist Day”. His “Dejuner” includes the instruction, “Take the olives and juice from one large jar of prepared green or black olives and throw them away. In the empty jar place several steel ball bearings… with this delicacy serve a loaf of French bread, 30 inches in length, painted a pale blue”. 

There is also John Keats’s Porridge: Favourite Recipes of American Poets. William Cole notes in the introduction that such collaborative recipe books can be seen as a metaphor for poetry, with “the poet as creator, inventor, who makes out of a few necessary ingredients a magic potion”. 

Cooking is a creative pursuit in itself (although as a side note, ‘creative’ and ‘cooking’ are words to be used together at your peril — or at the peril of whoever is eating your creation). There is also an argument that creative pursuits are recipes of a sort — after all, art is a cycle of borrowing, transformation and invention. And art is, as Oscar Wilde noted, a commodity — second only to the most literal consumer product there is: food. 

It turns out, then, there is a reason we are all obsessed with instagramming pictures of our pizza with an egg on it. You are what you eat — but you also are what you read, watch, listen to and create. Combining the two is both the ultimate form of self-expression, and the ultimate in self-indulgent consumption.

★★☆☆☆

Two Stars

It feels needlessly churlish to lambast The Love Punch for its cinematic failings, akin to punching a defenceless kitten for its lack of gravitas. The Love Punch was never intended to be anything more than 90-something minutes of gentle humour, bearable romance, and unemotional emotion, wrapped up in a fluffy storyline as ridiculous as it is clichéd and sealed with a conclusion as predictable as it is inevitable.

Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan play Mr and Mrs Jones, a divorced couple fleeced of their retirement funds by a dastardly French hedge-funder. They decide to get their own back by following said banker to his wedding on the French Riviera and removing a priceless diamond from his possession. Timothy Spall and Celia Imrie tag along for the ride. Hilarity does not ensue, but tame one-liners and corny romantic clichés come trotting feebly behind.

Ground-breaking portrait of life in middle-age it may not be, but The Love Punch does have memorable moments. Pleasant mockery of the money-grabbing lifestyle abounds and Louise Bourgoin is enjoyable as the shallow, but doubting, fiancé of the melodramatic antagonist. There is even a semblance of chemistry between Thompson and Brosnan, although this is disappointingly stifled by the script’s lack of sophistication.

One could use The Love Punch as an illustration of modern film-making’s shortcomings. It has no recognisable intent, a distinct lack of emotional sophistication and, one suspects, the four major names involved were sold on the project principally because of its exotic filming locations. Yet the film has no pretensions to grandeur. This is The Love Punch‘s saving grace. It’s not trying to be anything spectacular, or moving, or even mildly thought-provoking. We as the audience know this, the director knows this, and the four august ‘national treasures’ it stars know this too, allowing them to preserve their well-earned dignity as they swan merrily about the Côte d’Azur.

As director Joel Hopkins opines, if cynicism is left at the door and one ‘just goes with it’, The Love Punch is enjoyable. Its failings melt away into irrelevance and one can relax with hour and a half of light, meaningless entertainment, safe in the knowledge that nobody is taking this film too seriously. And not one kitten has to be punched.

In 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure co-wrote ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, a massive hit single that raised £8m for charity, remained the all-time best-selling UK single for thirteen years, and established music as a means for raising money for charity, spawning Live Aid and the later incarnations of Band Aid. Its famous chorus “feed the world” has become iconic in the struggle against Third World poverty. 

However, it is George Harrison’s 1971 single, ‘Bangla Desh’, that is widely considered to be the first true charity single. But it wasn’t even The Other Beatle who first had the idea of using music to raise money for a good cause. In 1742, Handel held a charity concert in Ireland at which he first presented his Messiah. All the money made went towards prisoners’ debt relief, the Mercer’s Hospital, and the Charitable Infirmary. 

Despite these precursors, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and the subsequent Live Aid concert organized by Mr Geldof himself remain one of the most iconic moments in musical, and cultural charity history. The list of artists who made it to the studio to record the song on November 25th 1984 is quite staggering: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, George Michael, Sting, Bono, Phil Collins, the list goes on. A number of artists also recorded messages for the B-side of the single, including David Bowie, who said, “It’s Christmas 1984, and there are more starving folk on our planet than ever before.” 

The song comes under a lot of criticism, often over its wording, which creates an implicit divide between the affluent West and the starving Ethiopians — “do they know?” — but the lyrics are to some extent aware of this. Bono chimes in at one point with an ironic “well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you”. It is impossible to get away from the song being a case of rich musicians singing to affluent Westerners, but the self-awareness present throughout is often missed, and, in any case, it is the effect that matters. 

It’s not just the approximate total of £50m raised by the song itself and the concert following it; it’s the US follow-up involving Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and others, it’s the huge rise in awareness as a result of popular culture taking up the cause of the starving majority and it’s the mass of charity records and charity concerts that it has spawned. Yes, it seems crass and yes, it’s all sickeningly self-congratulatory, but these aspects are part of the reason that this sort of thing works — the 2004 song ‘Grief Never Grows Old’, released in aid of the Indian Ocean tsunami was an appalling piece of crap, but I still bloody bought it. 

‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has a remarkable legacy, especially for such a bad song, and we would do well to think about the good it did before we criticize its intelligence or its sensitivity. 

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip has transcended its medium and spawned a global enterprise. At the height of its success it was featured in over 2,600 newspapers, remaining relevant to generations of fans through the timeless themes addressed by so many of its beloved characters. Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Pattie and Charlie Brown have risen above their immediate context of a strife-ridden, post- war America and offer timeless, thought provoking entertainment for millions of fans.

Starting life in the 1950s, Peanuts is a pioneering work of comic strip art. Previously the medium was defined by either slapstick comedy or puns. Schulz did away with these conventions, utilising minimalist art and the use of blank, empty spaces to create an eye-catching work, equally attractive in black and white, and later, bright and simple colours. Stylistically the strips are superb, with an astonishing range of emotions possible on the children’s seemingly simple faces. The grief endured by Charlie Brown after his team’s inevitable defeat, the quizzical appearance of Rerun and Lucy’s perpetual fury are artistically engaging, and this feature alone would distinguish the work.

However, it is the content that truly sets these strips apart. Within four panels Schulz can evoke strong feelings of pathos without undermining the strip’s humour. Perhaps understandably from a cartoonist who believed his relative unhappiness lent the strip its distinctive appeal, Peanuts features the subjects of depression, dislike, race relations, Vietnam and narcolepsy. Today such humour is commonplace whereas in the 1960s and ‘70s it was positively groundbreaking.

The combination of minimalist art and economical language is what makes this strip truly outstanding and worthy of comparison with other literary forms. While other comic strips like Garfield have achieved comparative success, they cannot escape Peanuts’ shadow or surpass their humour. Peanuts is unique. Featuring perhaps the widest range of characters of any cartoon, bar The Simpsons, which regularly references Schulz’s work, Peanuts is a testament to its originator’s creativeness and natural wit that over almost half a century the characters stayed funny and relevant.

Ben Macintyre has become an authority on spies, an expert at crafting together the material into gripping stories, which, if made up, would certainly be accused of being implausible. His latest, A Spy Among Friends, follows the story of Kim Philby, one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, and the greatest double agent ever seen, whose memory still overshadows the secret services.

I meet Ben after a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival, which packed Christ Church hall. He’s a natural story teller, and in the hour long lecture took us through Philby’s life with such skill and enthusiasm that the characters come to life in his words.

Afterwards, we grab a table in the tea room off the side of the hall, and I admit to having forgotten pen and paper, upon which he pulls both from his pocket and hands them to me. A long time correspondent at the Times, he claims to have fallen victim to this himself many a time.

Macintyre writes about the Cambridge spies, but, he tells me, there was an Oxford spy ring – of course, it wasn’t really up to much, he jokes; Macintyre is himself a Cambridge man. But its recruiters were the same Soviet agents that won over the Cambridge lot, so, he reassures me, there was no Russian bias to the other place!

Macintyre has always been interested in spies – he was himself ‘tapped-up’ at Cambridge, recruited for the secret service. Apparently it went no further than the interview, when, he says, they realised pretty quickly that he wasn’t spy material.

What is it about spies that so attracts us, I wonder, and particularly captures Macintyre? “I think spying is one of those subjects that’s a great backdrop for all the things that we all think are important, like loyalty, love, betrayal, drama, adventure, war…I mean, the actually process of spying is quite interesting, but it’s the kind of emotions and the human, moral issues that it throws up that really get us”.

“It’s the sort of things you’d quite like to write about in a novel, but because it’s all true, you know, you don’t have to make anything up’. Certainly, the spies of Macintyre’s books are almost too good to be true. Eddie Chapman (Agent ‘Zigzag’), was a sort of crook turned double agent; ‘he’s a dreadful man, but incredibly good fun, a wicked womanizer and shocking figure, but incredibly good fun to write about”.

Agent Zigzag was a crook, but he was ultimately on our side, winning the war. Ben’s latest, about Kim Philby, is different – ‘this is the darkest of them. This is about a dense, brutal, intimate betrayal between two people, one of whom thought they were the closest friends there could possibly be, so it has a kind of psychological brutality to it’.

Has Philby been as much fun to write about? A figure who ruthlessly handed absolutely everything over to the KGB, responsible for possibly thousands of deaths. Absolutely! He offers “much more opportunity to get right deep inside the psychology of men who to us seem strangely of another world – this kind of clubby, male friendship, where they sat around all day talking about cricket”. A world where men had come through the war together and felt a deep, inherent belief in each other.

To this day, it is the charm of people like Philby that stands out – he was above suspicion, he was ‘one of us’, the ‘right sort of chap’. “If he’d walked into a room you’d have thought “my God, the lights have all gone on”, only he was wicked, I mean, a really bad man, but such fun, and so funny! He had an old world charm – to us there’s something creepy about that sort of charm now”.

Inevitably one thinks of Bond, how much is real about the charming womaniser? Macintyre has written a sort of biography of Bond and Fleming, so I ask how this relates to his real-life spy, Kim Philby. “The Bond thing makes him invisible to us, to other Bonds, you can’t see him, because he’s perfect. His education, charm, manners, his looks even, made him invisible.’ He was so much the Bond that no one could have guessed at his betrayal – it’s telling that his only vetting for the secret service was a word from the head of MI5;”I know his people”. Compare this to Stalin’s ‘nobody is above suspicion’ and perhaps we can see why the Soviet intelligence managed to infiltrate the British and American so well.”

Philby was invisible in his day – now he’s the very stereotype of a spy. Who is the modern day Philby, the modern invisible man? ‘Now the invisible spy is a young Muslim woman from Bradford – she’s the perfect recruit for MI5 because she can penetrate Al-Qaeda cells and the like, but she’s also the person that Al-Qaeda are after.’

The parallels are clear; “they’re all fishing in the same pond, as they were in 1930s Cambridge. MI5 is full of young Asian women – and it still haunts them today, the fear that, already in the system, are people like Philby, ‘clean skins’ in the trade term, who have got in because they look right.”

It’s not often that you go to a student production and forget that it’s not professional. And yet as I watched the Oxford Playhouse’s production of “History Boys” I found myself thinking that the group of schoolboys and schoolmasters on stage were professional actors, if not the characters themselves. It’s hardly surprising that this cast boasts the crème de la crème of Oxford’s thespy talent when you learn that over 100 boys auditioned for the eleven male parts.

Alan Bennett’s play, set in 1980s Sheffield, tells the story of a group of Oxbridge hopefuls undergoing an application process which involves fewer UCAS forms and more gay propositions than most nowadays.

The play’s unlikely hero is Hector, an enigmatic teacher who believes exams to be the ‘enemy of education’. He is a source of profound inspiration to the boys, but has rather too strong a penchant for cupping their balls on his motorbike rides home. Benedict Morrison is flawless, portraying both Hector’s endearing and repellent aspects.

Hector’s younger counterpart, Urwin, is brought to life by Harley Viveash, who also manages to convey the nuances of his character’s complex personality through his witty rapport with the boys, who unfailingly end their interpolations with a condescending ‘sir’.

The boys, Hector’s ‘ignorant little tarts’, are not only brilliant as an ensemble but also individually. Luke Rollason (Posner), Tommy Siman (Dakin) and Nathan Ellis (Scripps) all provide strong performances in their lead roles. But even the smaller roles are delivered expertly.

A special mention must go to Frazer Hembrow who makes a superbly convincing Rudge, a particularly ignorant little tart, who gets into Christchurch by merit of the fact that he is ‘clearly what the college rugby team needs’. I think we all know someone like that.

The play is punctuated by Ellis’ musical interludes on the piano, which unfortunately sometimes drown out the voices of his co-stars. At the end the boys all come together to give a touching a capella rendition of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ with some excellent harmonies. This cast is certainly not short of talent.

What the 2006 film fails to convey at times is Bennett’s wonderful and distinctive humour. The play, however, is brilliantly comic. As Posner reads out the definition of ‘otiose’ from the dictionary, a perfectly timed ball of crumpled paper hits his head.

The play pivots from uproarious highs – the boys simulating a scene at a brothel as part of their French lesson – to poignant lows – Hector breaking down in heart-wrenching sobs in front of his pupils. The director, James Lorenz paces the play brilliantly to show the balance between humour and pathos and to demonstrate the ups and downs in the ‘long nothingness of life’.

If you can, grab a ticket to Saturday’s matinée, the only performance not yet sold out, because this play is a first week must-see!