Short Shelf Life

Always the sworn enemy of all that is popular, Book Notes feels obliged to give readers fair warning. The festive season is but three months away and publishers have a glittering mass of blockbusters targeted at your unfortunate Christmas stocking.

In the coming weeks, new and as yet unnamed titles from super-scribblers Michael Crichton, Stephen King and John Grisham will beseige bookshops with the sort of fury not seen since the Vandals laid waste to Rome. It will then be only a matter of hours before they reach their final destination – the nearest charity shop.  

That lovable mass-murderer Dr Hannibal Lecter is also making a comeback. Last seen in 1999, the classical scholar, cannibal and bon viveur will be set free in Hannibal Rising on 6 December. In a neat move, Lecter creator Thomas Harris has adapted the book from his own script for the Hannibal Rising film due out next year. At least he believes in getting value for money. The story will chart Lecter's early life and crimes and, since the involvement of Anthony Hopkins has yet to be confirmed, everyone from Michael Caine to Krusty the Clown will no doubt be vying for the role.

Romantic Genius

"The man of genius has truth enshrined in his breast and his eyes always on nature," wrote the great essayist and radical thinker William Hazlitt in 1821. He knew what he was talking about because, apart from being a genius himself, he was a comrade of the most celebrated and eccentric minds of the age, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their collaboration, which led to the Lyrical Ballads, is now the subject of The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge by Adam Sisman.

This new book is a study of their poetic styles and a chronicle of the turbulent time they spent working together.

Sisman sees Wordsworth and Coleridge as being like the rock stars of today. Their uninhibited exploration of the possibilities of poetry was matched by their bohemian lifestyles. Wordsworth believed he was universally despised and cared for only by his beloved sister. Coleridge's life was divided between opium-induced meditations and periods of random mania. In one instance of the latter, he wrote 27 issues of a magazine in 10 months. Neither made an effort to make money out of their poetry. They were concerned simply with being understood. How very romantic.

Cook's private eye

Book Notes is weary beyond comprehension of books about vacuous celebrities. Every debt-ridden hack is writing the life of some nobody to make a few shekels. But amidst the bubblegum is the occasional decent effort such as So Farewell Then, a biography of the cult satirist Peter Cook written by his wife of 10 years, Wendy. Wendy Cook believes that since his death the legendary comic has been misrepresented as a heartless misanthrope. Her book depicts him as a shy family man who struggled to reconcile his homelife and career before he let his dark side get the better of him.

So Farewell Then is also a vivid account of the decadent London of the 1960s of which Cook, founder of Britain's most frequently-sued magazine, Private Eye, was king.

One figure who emerges from the book with little dignity is David Frost. Wendy Cook claims that while her husband was touring America with Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller in the famous show Beyond the Fringe, Frost plagiarised Cook's scripts. The result was a BBC satirical show identical to one Cook had pitched before his departure.

And Frostie had the cheek to accuse Richard Nixon of being a traitor.

Ronan Browne is currently on leave