My Best Books

£17.99, Ebury Press

October 2008, sorry, I mean October 2006. My editor suggests we doctor the “diary” to make it look like I was the first person to spot Barack Obama’s potential. “It’ll make you look even more of a heavyweight,” he says. Who is he calling fat? I still don’t see what was wrong with my original fascinating entry about having lunch at the Ivy with Cheryl Cole and Jason Donovan.

December 2006 Simon Cowell phones. He’s looking for a not very bright, attention-seeking brown-noser with no self-awareness whatsoever to join him on the judging panel for America’s Got Talent. I look through my Rolodex and shake my head. “Can’t think of anyone,” I reply. “You’ve got the job,” he smirks.

February 2007 I have been asked to appear on Celebrity Apprentice with Sir Alan Sugar. Alastair Campbell is also a contestant so it’s clearly an A-list event. Alastair and I bond with some competitive arm-wrestling and boasting. These charity events are great for the career. Shame about the viewers.

April 2007 Ever since I opposed the Iraq war, some people have confused me with a serious political commentator. Gordon Brown is one of them. He invites me to Downing Street to ask what his first move should be when Tony Blair steps down. I tell him he should appear on Strictly Come Dancing and bomb Zimbabwe. I can see he’s taking it seriously.

June 2007 A nightmare journey to LA. I was dozing in first class when I was pestered by the Duchess of York, Shania Twain, Naomi Campbell, Sharon Osbourne, Fern Britton and Peaches Geldof - all desperate to give me a blow job. Then I woke up. Celia wasn’t best pleased that I had dribbled on her black PVC jeans. Still, it was nice that the TV company had sent a stretch limo to collect me at the airport, though it was the first time anyone had spelled my name Pierce Brosnan on the noticeboard.

Get to the Beverly Wilshire hotel and phone my agent for the viewing figures for my landmark TV series on Sandbanks. “I can’t find them anywhere,” he says. “Then ring ITV,” I reply. “I meant I can’t find any viewers.”

August 2007 Hillary Clinton has thrown her hat into the presidential ring. I’ve always been a great admirer of hers, unless she doesn’t win the nomination, in which case I will say I’ve always had my misgivings. Tonight is the grand finale of America’s Celebrity Apprentice, the TV show with famous nonentities that no one in the UK has ever heard of. And I win after getting myself filmed next to some crippled war veterans! This is the proudest day of my life.

October 2007 The government is having to bail out Northern Rock. I always said the financial system was inherently corrupt, ever since two Mirror journalists were done for share-price fixing. Brown phones to say he should have made me chancellor of the exchequer. I tell him he couldn’t afford me and put a block on his calls. His stock is falling and I can’t be associated with failure.

February 2008 My divorce with Marion is turning nasty. I hoped we would be able to split amicably, but now I’m making loads of cash her lawyers inexplicably feel she is entitled to a share. No way am I parting with the mid-life Maserati.

June 2008 An invite from Sir Alan Sugar to his 40th wedding anniversary party. No one seems to notice me, so I heckle the speeches. “Oh look, it’s that twat Morgan,” Simon Cowell says. Everyone stares at me. Result! My boys ask if I can bring along some celebrities to their prep school. I pull out all the stops and turn up with Amanda Holden and Gordon Ramsay. “We said celebrities, Dad,” they moan.

August 2008 I’m disgusted that Jonathan Ross has been leaving vile messages on an answerphone. He’s the worst kind of sycophantic sleazeball. He should be doing cutting-edge interviews for GQ, like asking Nick Clegg how many birds he’s shagged.

November 2008 Gordon’s ratings are up. I might start taking his calls again. And Barack Obama’s been elected president. I’d better ring Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lily Allen to remind them I said he’d do it.

The digested read, digested: Piers of the Brain Dead.

• Listen to the digested read podcast at guardian.co.uk/digested

When psychotherapist Jane Haynes decided to expose the shocking details of her life and work in an autobiography, many of her peers were horrified. But her patients not only supported her, they even helped her write it. By Stuart Jeffries

Earlier this month, the Jungian psychotherapist Jane Haynes held a dinner party. Among the 30 or so guests were several former patients whose case studies appear in her new book, Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? The Journal of a Psychotherapist, an unremitting account of sexual shame, social dysfunction, bereavement and attempted suicide - not to mention the author’s acid trip with the charismatic Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing.

The book has a cast of characters that novelists would kill for, and some of them found themselves chatting around Haynes’s dinner table - among them a woman who tried to kill herself four times. “Throughout the evening she was referred to as Miss Suicide,” Haynes recalls, giggling, as we sit in her consulting room in north London. It sounds like quite a party.

In the book, we meet Miss Suicide (as she is referred to throughout) when she rings to cancel an appointment because she has decided to go on holiday. Haynes doesn’t believe her: she is convinced the woman is going to try to kill herself again. And so it later proves: Miss Suicide rang off, went to Tesco, bought a bottle of whisky and some paracetamol and checked into a Holiday Inn, where she drank some of the whisky, took some of the pills and pulled a plastic bag over her head. In the book, Haynes transcribes the conversation she had with Miss Suicide later.

Haynes: “I knew that you had put a plastic bag over your head but [laughing] I didn’t know it was a Tesco shopping bag!”

“Yes, it was, it was!” replies Miss Suicide. “I hadn’t premeditated it. You see, it was to hand and I thought, well, just to make sure.”

An hour after Miss Suicide took the pills, a chambermaid came into the room and saved her life. “Had she not seen that Tesco bag,” Haynes explains, “she would have assumed my patient was asleep and left her.”

But didn’t Haynes feel responsible that a patient in her care tried to kill herself? “I was in a terrible conflict. I wanted to leave her the space to do what she had to do, but I had an ethical responsibility.” In the book she tells Miss Suicide, honestly if brusquely: “I didn’t have a burning desire to save you … there had already been too many failures for that, and it would have been hubris on my part to think I could become your saviour.”

Ten years on and Miss Suicide is now a dinner-party guest, reportedly beautiful, happy and pleased that her story is being recounted. But is what is disclosed between shrink and shrunken really proper material for a book?

“Some colleagues hate it,” Haynes concedes. “They think I shouldn’t write about my patients at all.” But she stresses that only former patients of hers appear in the book (”I think there has to be a reasonable period - at least two years - before one can have [further] contact with a patient”) and that all case histories are published with her patients’ consent. Indeed, several of the histories are written by the patients themselves, such as one man’s bracing and frank account of his internet porn addiction. “The pornography you look for becomes more intense, more hardcore, more misogynistic,” writes Harry. “It begins with lingerie ads and ends with gang bangs.”

What worries Haynes’s peers more than this kind of disclosure, however, is what she reveals of her own psychic history. Haynes addresses the first half of the book to Louis, her analyst of 13 years and a man with whom she experienced what she calls “erotic transference”. She describes memories of her own childhood troubles and analysis - but surely analysts are supposed to be a blank slate on to which patients project things. How can future patients, having read about Haynes’s often harrowing life, do that?

“I think my patients must be trusted as adults who can make up their minds. Some have told me they won’t read the book while they are being treated by me. Also, I don’t do analysis any more, where transference is key; only therapy, where forming a relationship is what’s important.”

Patients who avoid the book will miss the compelling story of how Haynes crawled from the wreckage of her childhood. As a girl, she was abandoned by her mother and raised, albeit briefly, by a father dying of syphilis who ultimately suffered what doctors called “general paralysis of the insane”. He was a tyrant whom Haynes compares to Hitler, yet whom she also refers to late in the book as “beloved”.

After his death, he became an even more harrowing figure: years later, while doing a doctorate on Jacobean literature, her dreams became filled with horrors such as her father’s face being eaten hollow, just as Dr Pangloss’s were when Candide meets him, ravaged by syphilis, in Voltaire’s novel.

“I knew that by the time my father’s disease was identified in 1950, it was too advanced for penicillin. He would not have died featureless, but he did die choking and abandoned, probably in a padded cell.” Gamely, she subsequently focused her PhD thesis on venereal disease in Jacobean literature.

Haynes also writes about the killing of her son-in-law 10 years ago, in what may have been a racist attack. Jay Abatan, a 42-year-old who was half Nigerian, was getting into a taxi outside a Brighton nightclub. He was felled with a single unprovoked blow that, as she writes, “flattened his handsome frame to the granite kerb. Despite the expertise of the intensive care unit, Jay never regained consciousness and died one week later in my daughter’s arms … His assailants were white, early-middle-aged family men. Would they have acted in the same way if Jay had been white? I really couldn’t say. And the police, post Macpherson, forgot to ask.”

There’s a world of fury in that ironically italicised “family”: Abatan’s family was the one devastated by his killing. An inquest into his death was recently postponed but hangs over the family, poised to reopen old wounds. Haynes shows me a photograph of her son-in-law that she keeps in the consulting room, depicting him forever smiling and forever young.

Her book started as an attempt at catharsis and a memorial for her deceased analyst, Louis. Haynes, though, struggled to get it into print. Publishers ran scared of the book because they couldn’t see where it would go on bookshop shelves: it’s not quite memoir, not quite self-help. “I got a large number of very polite rejection letters,” she giggles.

Undaunted, Haynes published the book herself. It became the first self-published book to be shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley award for autobiography last year. It didn’t win, but subsequently she had publishers fighting over it. “In the end I’m being published by Constable, because my editor is one of the few publishers who actually read it rather than read about it.”

What’s most striking about the book, particularly in our publishing climate of showy confession, is how Haynes resists succumbing to the lurid raciness of her material. She even reduces her LSD experience with RD Laing to a footnote - but what a footnote! Laing gave her more than acid, though: “He helped me to get outside my own family narrative, and write a new one,” she says.

Having been poised on the brink of a potentially brilliant acting career, Haynes quit after reading Laing’s then new book, The Divided Self. It convinced her that acting had become a substitute for establishing an authentic connection with herself. Intriguingly, many of her patients today are actors.

The title of her book comes from a question asked by King Lear when he finds himself wandering naked and crazed on the heath. “And do you know who answers him?” Haynes asks. “It’s the Fool, who says: ‘Lear’s shadow.’” Haynes likes the answer, it fits in with what she thinks a shrink should help a patient to do. “People who come to me want to look at their shadows.”

Business for such a service is now booming, she says. “The credit crunch has made so many people flee to me.” Except that in many cases, she tells them she may not be the answer to their problems. “Lots of people who have been made redundant or fear it suffer panic attacks. In those circumstances, some other form of therapy - say, cognitive behavioural therapy - may be necessary to deal with the symptoms first, before you decide to talk about the underlying issues. And in some cases, people don’t want to explore the underlying issues.”

Indeed, Haynes concedes her talking cure can sometimes be counterproductive. “Therapy can be positively harmful - it is like burning through the flesh to the wound. It’s quite a decision to enter into that kind of relationship and not for everyone.”

Our time is up. A patient has arrived and is changing her baby’s nappy in the next room. As Haynes poses on her couch for photos, her mobile rings. “Dooo do do do doo do do doo doo doo doo,” it begins. “Don’t worry … be happy.” Given what we’ve just been talking about, this ring tone is unexpected, to put it mildly.

• Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?: The Journal of a Psychotherapist is published by Constable. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

The Story of Vasco, adapted by Ted Hughes in 1965, opened last week in London. Director Adam Barnard, talks about discovering the text, and its distinctive sense of drama

Stuart Maconie fails to find Middle England, but his attempt is magnificent, says Euan Ferguson

Going in search of “Middle England” is fast becoming as much a staple of Middle England as all those spurious examples - Marmite, hedgerows, the Spitfire, Mr Pooter, old maids cycling - that these very journeys are meant to be seeking. Every five years or so, a treasured writer/broadcaster - Bryson, Paxman, Marr, now Stuart Maconie (previously the author of Pies and Prejudice) - brings out a book about it and in between a host of lesser journalists apes them.

You know the kind of thing. He (it’s usually a he) will get off a train in some emblematic non-London town with the potential to exemplify this nebulous state of middling grace - Cranford (Knutsford in real life), or Tunbridge Wells, one of Austen’s handsome Regency spa towns or a butt of jokes like Surbiton or Slough. They will note down the small ads in the newsagent’s, visit the funny or winning or pathetic little museum and have a pint with the locals in both the revered old horse-brass place by the canal and the evil blue-alcopop Wetherspoons. The resulting travelogues have often been diverting enough, even if none can really claim to have “found” Middle England.

Maconie comes no closer than his predecessors to discovering exactly what, or where, this place is that politicians constantly court and satirists lampoon. But, goodness, what a journey he takes us on. Adventures on the High Teas is magnificent: sprawling in its research, illuminating, quirky, saddening, fun, often angry, and always intensely readable. Maconie does all the usual museum-pub stuff, but what elevates his account is his fabulous hinterland of knowledge. Better known as a radio presenter, biographer of, among others, Blur and all-round northern lad, here he displays a vast, rapacious capacity to know things. What he doesn’t know, he finds out.

Thus, amid the travels, we get mini-essays on Vaughan Williams versus Elgar, 60s architecture, geology, the British food revolution, Oxbridge myths and realities, Tolkien’s Birmingham, bad public art, Nick Drake, Ronnie Barker’s waistcoats, Larkin’s angst, Jim Morrison’s posturing, stoicism, cocaine, proper ice cream.

He is, unusually for a writer these days, confidently unafraid to quote from Orwell. This is apt enough. Partly because in touching on, and updating, similar material - Donald McGill’s postcards, the English literary murder - it would be wilful not to; but partly because, were the lugubrious one still around, I suspect he would applaud Maconie, at his best, as a dissector with a similarly cunning scalpel.

Politically, he wears his heart on his sleeve, which could militate against impartiality but actually helps this grand book (the absolutely worst thing about which is the title). Apart from the fact that some of his posh-boy-bashing gets repetitive (what has poor Tom Parker Bowles ever done to him?), the fact that you know where Maconie’s coming from makes you trust him. It also makes you want him to have his mind changed a little.

As, of course, it is. He ends up falling a little in love with Middle England, or what he’s found of it anyway. England, it turns out, is a far more tolerant country than his bete noire, the Daily Mail, would have us believe. It is a country where schoolboys can still be alarmingly polite, where harried, underpaid waitresses and check-out girls can be shockingly, Bafta-winningly funny. A country that, despite its bad points - as he says in one throwaway phrase, we are still, bizarrely, a nation that loves experts but hates intellectuals - still charms.

It’s still a place where, at its best, when the train stops at one of the few small stations left (there’s a fabulous diatribe against Beeching which will make readers as retrospectively angry as they have ever been against thoughtless blight), and no one gets on and no one gets off, no one really minds.

He’s been compared with Bill Bryson (who, again, he is winningly unafraid to quote). Fair enough. But Maconie’s hinterland of knowledge here sets him above that stranger on these shores; there are very few of the “so that was nice enough” tail-offs or bemused rhetorical going-nowhere questions. Maconie, if he asks himself a question, particularly a political one, tries his best to answer it, and having lived here for ever, and soaked it up, with attitude, he most often succeeds.

At his best, he is as funny as Bryson and as wise as Orwell. And - this is entirely assumed, and possibly deeply unfair, and I know we all love Bill and revere George - he has far, far better taste in music than either.

From Marilyn to a Mafia moll, Kennedy’s conquests are breathlessly revisited. But to what purpose, asks Sean O’Hagan

In 1947, Robert Penn Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for All the King’s Men, a novel that recounts the rise to power of a populist political demagogue who becomes governor of an unnamed state in the American south. All the King’s Men was a bestseller and in 1949 it was turned into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film. (A more faithful version, starring Sean Penn, was made in 2006.)

At the time of its publication, the novel attracted considerable controversy as it was widely believed to be a fictionalised account of the life of a real politician, Huey Long, who had been governor of Louisiana in the early 1930s. Warren, though, always insisted that this was not the case and that his protagonist, the grasping and venal Willie Stark, sprang fully formed from his imagination. “One of the unfortunate characteristics of our time,” Warren wrote in an introduction to a later edition of the book, “is that the reception of a novel may depend on its journalistic relevance.”

What, one wonders, would Warren have made of American Adulterer? Its subject is the compulsive sex life of the most revered and charismatic America president of recent times, John

Fitzgerald Kennedy, which it explores in forensic detail. Generically, Jed Mercurio’s novel sits alongside the likes of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, being a fictionalised account of real events involving real people in the cut and thrust of American presidential politics.

But whereas Klein gleefully satirised Bill Clinton’s successful first campaign and Sittenfeld brilliantly imagined the Laura Bush that lay behind the preternaturally placid public mask, it is difficult to tell what exactly Mercurio is doing with JFK, other than telling us - in far too much made-up, often lurid, detail - what we already know.

We know, for instance, that JFK possessed, like many great leaders, a sexual appetite that matched his political ambition. We know, too, that he bedded Marilyn Monroe, then the most desirable woman in the world - at least on Hollywood’s exaggerated terms - as well as at least one “Mafia moll”, several society beauties, sundry high-class call-girls and smitten White House junior staffers as well as the inevitable intern or two. In this demolition of Kennedy’s American Camelot, JFK’s sex drive is portrayed as an addiction. “If I don’t have a women for three days,” he tells a bemused Harold Macmillan, “I get terrible headaches.”

The narrative voice initially seems to belong to one of the physicians who were constantly on call to treat JFK’s bouts of sexual cold turkey, as well as the chronic back pain that dogged him daily and the Addison’s disease that may, had he survived those bullets in Dallas, have ended his life prematurely. Mercurio’s relentless chronicling of these ailments, and their treatment by cortisone injections and prescribed pills, is almost as off-putting as his obsessive detailing of Kennedy’s myriad sexual encounters, which, in this telling, tend towards the nasty, brutish and short.

The sense that we are reading not a novel but a case study is established at the start with the deployment of a detached and clinical narrative voice that initially refers to the president only as “the subject”. This conceit is not sustained, however, and as the narrative voice falters, so, too, does the novel. Throughout, you never quite know who is telling the story or, indeed, why.

For all that, Mercurio’s writing is good enough in places to create long passages of sustained dramatic tension, even when, as is always the case with novels that fictionalise real events, you know the outcome. The Cuban missile crisis in the early Sixties is skilfully recreated in all its apocalyptic drama, and the JFK who emerges from this section is of a different and altogether more complex, calibre than the one-dimensional alpha male who swaggers - or limps painfully - though most of the narrative.

Here and there, too, there are a few laughs, though they usually tend towards the puerile. One chapter, entitled “The Schlong”, touches on the anxieties that underlie JFK’s über-masculinity. It hinges on the scene in which a strutting Frank Sinatra drops his swimming trunks before JFK and a pool full of Palm Beach hookers to reveal his “brutal” appendage. “This,” he quips, before jumping into the pool, “makes me first man.” How you react to that punchline may be a good indicator of how you react to the book as a whole.

The question that nagged at me throughout, though, was why was this book written? The journalistic evidence for JFK’s priapic adventurism has already been gathered in several biographies, none of which has dented his enduring charisma or his political reputation. Besides, the Clinton years have come and gone, leaving the American electorate, and the world at large, with few illusions as to the fallibility of those who hold the highest office. (The young Clinton is glimpsed in the book and his infamous Monica moment is referred to when an FBI special investigator asks JFK: “Have you had sexual relations with this woman?”)

The jacket blurb states that American Adulterer “poses controversial questions about society’s evolving fixation on the private lives of public officials and ultimately ignites a polemic on monogamy, marriage and traditional family values”. If only. Instead, it panders to that same fixation, while what Mercurio calls in his afterword the book’s “numerous instances of artistic licence” only defuse rather than ignite the promised polemic.

For all its evocation of a bygone era, when the private lives of the politically powerful were protected from the public gaze, American Adulterer is a novel of our times: shameless and prurient, detached and salacious.

Graham Swift’s first work of non-fiction is tainted by literary back-scratching, finds Hilary Mantel

For some writers, an unhappy childhood is their most precious possession. Not so for Graham Swift; all was serene in south Croydon, where he grew up. His grandparents’ house in Sydenham was lofty and faintly sinister, but when the child mounted the steep stairs there was the reward, at the top, of an old-fashioned typewriter with “stiff epaulettes of spokes”, with which he was allowed to play. He enjoys the geography he was born into; in adult life, after some early hippyish travels, he sees no need to stray far beyond the south London suburbs about whose hidden and lost charms he writes eloquently in one of the short pieces that make up this collection. The finest is the title piece; it is a memoir of his father, who had seen war service in the Fleet Air Arm before settling to a happy marriage and a civil service career. A loving son, Swift recalls his early retirement, his years of contentment and a “quick and cruel” end at 70, after facing his final illness with “workmanlike co-operation”. Swift also is workmanlike; the piece has his hallmarks, his delicate attention to the inner life of the “ordinary” man, his understated and thoughtful engagement.

The rest of the collection is less lustrous. Swift has combed through his archive, no doubt in advance of its recent transfer to the British Library. He has come up with some old interviews, poems, topographical excursions, ruminations on his own career path. Born in 1949, he begins his personal story with an account of that dreaded rite of postwar childhood, the polio inoculation; he extends it, not without effort, into a meditation on fiction. Swift is not a keen researcher, he admits, but research into himself might have paid off; the “pale floret” he retains on his left arm is more likely to be from a smallpox vaccination.

Schooldays at Dulwich College seem uneventful; he wanted to be a writer, but was afraid of his own ambition. He began writing at York University while pretending to pursue a doctorate. He had a spell as a language teacher on a Greek island; there was a veranda, a vine, all the essentials for life-changing inspiration. But he didn’t turn into John Fowles; returning to England, he edged diffidently into his craft, jettisoning a failed first manuscript, and became a part-time teacher to pay his way while he established himself. His third novel, Waterland, captured the critics’ attention and received huge acclaim. Published in 1983, it remains much loved and much studied, its watery Fenland landscapes seeping into the imagination of thousands of readers. It was made into a disastrous film, about which Swift is philosophical; place being of its essence, large parts of the action were shifted to Pittsburgh.

Swift had never lived in the Fens, a fact about which readers have been incredulous: “It began to be supposed there was something aqueous about me.” His main complaint about the interpretation of his work is one he shares with many novelists; he is assumed to be regurgitating autobiographical events in disguised form, and the role of the imagination is not acknowledged. He usually writes in the first person, which encourages such simple-minded misreading. The choice of first person is not an effort at self-assertion, rather the opposite; he says, “I’d regard it as a mark of achievement if in my work the author seems to vanish.” In this respect he is unlike some of his contemporaries, who aim to leave their teeth marks in each sentence. Swift was one of those singled out in 1983 as the “Best Young British Novelists”. In 1996 he won the Booker prize for Last Orders, and despite his success he seems genuinely modest; invited to Hollywood, he reflects, “I think Twickenham’s more my sort of place.” He writes wryly about not winning the Booker prize for Waterland, and being misidentified in a press photo as the winner, JM Coetzee.

It wouldn’t hurt, then, to know Graham Swift better; sadly, the impression left by Making an Elephant is that a proper memoir is just too much effort. The publisher’s jacket copy claims the book “brims with charm and candour”. Both terms apply to an elegant little essay on Montaigne and his translator John Florio. But it is doubtful whether Swift has calculated how his personal reminiscences will appear to writers who are outside the literary world and long for the chance to publish. The book will confirm their worst fears about literary back-scratching. Much of it is a prolonged old pals act. “Buying a Guitar with Ish” is about his friendship with Kazuo Ishiguro: “It’s perhaps not much known that Ish has a musical side.” There is a small photograph of the author drinking tea with his friend; it is captioned “Tea with Ish”. Another piece is about his friendship with Salman Rushdie in fatwa days. A third is about hanging out with Caryl “Caz” Phillips: “. . . I’ve probably - no, definitely - had more beers with Caz than with any other writer-friend.” Another is about fishing in Devon with Ted Hughes: there is a photo of the poet laureate, looking drenched; the fish we must imagine. Each of these sections has a separate introduction to tell us what it is going to say, in case we grow over-excited. The effect is of self-congratulatory padding.

Most embarrassing of all is an interview with Swift by Patrick McGrath, the New York-based novelist, first printed in 1986. Was it worth dusting off, to recapture such insights as “writing is a lonesome business”? The friends discuss “magical realism” - “I think it’s important for fiction to be magical,” Swift chips in earnestly. The writers of his generation, by being open to exotic influences, have helped save English culture from being “terribly self-absorbed and isolated”; Swift says that “English fiction of the immediate postwar period, up to the 60s and early 70s, was terribly bound up by its own Englishness” and “just didn’t travel”. How true; there was no one on the library shelves in those days but grizzled Greene and weary Waugh, musty Murdoch and saggy Spark; not an ounce of magic between them, was there? And of course, the rest of the world had never heard of them.

• Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall is published in May.

What happens when the prince falls for a pill-popping Hollywood starlet and takes her to Sandringham? To mark Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, Kate Atkinson brings the story of La Traviata into the 21st century, while Posy Simmonds celebrates the festival in a new set of drawings

“Opera does not threaten us. Fiction does.” Frederick R Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Development of the English Novel in the 18th Century

There was this old English actress called Phoebe Something-Or-Other. Hart-Williams? Hill-West? Skylar never could remember (not that she tried very hard). Phoebe Something-Or-Other was huge, like a big old toad and, on set, in between takes, she sat in a corner and did some kind of sewing. (”Cross-stitch. You should try it, sweetie.”) It didn’t matter who you were, star of the movie or a faceless runner, you were “sweetie” to her. It got on Skylar’s nerves. It was so British. She was tired of everything British, especially the weather.

They were in the make-up trailer, five in the morning in the middle of nowhere. (Kent? Somethingshire?) Wherever it was, it was green and dripping with water. Every day on location they had to stop for rain, most days they never even got started. They were shooting an outdoor scene where Skylar had to ride a horse down a hill towards a big old house. She had to cry as she rode. Then she had to jump off the horse and run towards Phoebe (who was playing her grandmother), standing on the steps of the house. They weren’t allowed inside the house.

Skylar would have liked to have seen inside the house. Skylar’s tears should be, according to the director, “a mixture of joy and relief, tinged with sadness and regret for what might have been”. All that and on a horse! What did he think she was? (”An actress, sweetie?”)

The script called for the horse to gallop but they’d compromised on a kind of trot because horses made Skylar want to pee her pants. They were so damn big! Skylar was barely five foot two and way under a hundred pounds. Of course, she looked gigantic on screen but Mom had been helping Skylar keep the pounds off ever since she won the Augusta Sweet Pea Pageant when she was knee-high to a gnat’s heel.

They refused to dope the horse so she had to fill herself with Xanax and be hitched up by the horse wrangler and the chief stunt guy. Over and over, because of the rain, because of the petrified expression on Skylar’s face. Plus, she had to do the whole thing side-saddle in a dress the size of a Big Top. It was a costume drama, an 18th-century thing, about thwarted passion, from some novel that had won a prize. The Girl Who Went Astray - which was a real dumb title in Skylar’s opinion. The crew called it The Girl With Big Tits. Some people had no manners. They were big, it was true, they’d been paid for with the money from a Dr Pepper ad she did when she was 16. She was 22 now. She hoped that if she ever got to be as old as Phoebe someone would shoot her.

In the movie Skylar was playing a hooker who was really an heiress but she didn’t know it (until the happy, happy end) because she’d been swapped at birth after her mother died, leaving only a locket behind to identify her by. (Eventually, by Phoebe, her grandmother, et cetera). Harry, Skylar’s agent, said she should do the movie so she could “capitalise” on her accent, seeing as it had taken her “so damn long to get it right”. That was on account of her being English in her last movie as well. (”All Hollywood A-listers do English,” her agent said. “It’s the only way you’ll ever get an Oscar.”) She’d played a spy in the second world war. All very tragic, et cetera. They had shot the whole thing in Hungary. In a Time of Madness, it was called. (It was!) She was killed by a firing-squad at the end. They did 22 takes of that. By the end, the look of suffering on her face was real

They were holding the premiere tonight in Leicester Square. It was the last thing Skylar felt like doing but everyone said it was going to be a big movie (not like this one, for sure). “Selling yourself to the press goes with the territory, sweetie,” Phoebe said. As if Skylar, of all people, didn’t know that! Skylar knew exactly where Phoebe Something-Or-Other could stick her sewing. And the sun definitely didn’t shine there!

Phoebe was eating a bacon roll. “Mm. On-set catering,” she said. “The best thing about this job.” Yeugh. Skylar tried not to inhale the scent of dead, fried pig, instead she took two Ritalin, to keep the weight down and perk her up (what more could you ask for in a pill?). Peering in the mirror Phoebe said, “Gawd love us -” (or something like that). “What an old crone I am.”

“You have a wonderful face!” Skylar’s make-up girl gushed at Phoebe. “So much character.” “Character” meant old. Skylar didn’t want to have any character.

Everyone (except Skylar) loved Phoebe. They called her a “national treasure”, like she was part of the crown jewels. (Skylar had been to the Tower of London, a special out-of-hours visit that someone arranged for her. It was cool.) Whenever anyone needed an English queen in a movie they wheeled in Phoebe. (”Oh, God, yes, sweetie, I’ve done them all, Elizabeth, Victoria, Mary Q of S, Anne Boleyn - when I was younger, of course.”) The way she behaved you would think she was royalty.

“Soothes the nerves,” Phoebe said, waving her bit of sewing in Skylar’s face. It was a cushion cover with a big pink rose on it. It was almost finished and if you stared at it long enough you felt you were being sucked inside the rose. “You have trouble with your nerves, don’t you, sweetie?” Phoebe persisted. The way she said it was real, real catty in Skylar’s opinion. “Well, nervous exhaustion,” Skylar said. “That was what I was hospitalised with.” (It had been all over the papers, no point in denying it.) “Nervous exhaustion is different from nerves,” Skylar pointed out. Of course, everyone knew that “nervous exhaustion” meant you were wiped out on drugs or booze or sex (or in Skylar’s case all three). She bounced right back though. Two weeks in a clinic in Arizona and she was good to go. Again.

“You know what they say about all publicity being good publicity, Skylar?” her manager, Marty, said. “Well, it’s not necessarily true. You don’t want a reputation with the studio. Look what happened to Lindsay. Cut down on the partying.” But, darn it, she was young! All she wanted was some fun, what was wrong with that? There were no parties out in the godforsaken countryside. Her stunt double (yes, she had a stunt double and no, the stunt double couldn’t do the horse galloping thing because the director was a realism Nazi) and her accent coach (who was on set all the time, it was like being back at school) wanted to take her to the local pub last night but she took a couple of Ambien instead and talked to her Mom on the phone until she fell asleep.

The hotel where she was staying didn’t even have 24-hour room service. It didn’t actually have room service but Skylar’s people had a word with someone and now they brought up bad coffee and limp salads to her room. Her personal trainer said she couldn’t have coffee but Skylar didn’t really care. Her personal trainer who, by the way, was down here in Somethingshire for no reason because there wasn’t time for Skylar to work out. No time for Skylar to do anything. So the personal trainer was doing nothing on Skylar’s dollar. Like a lot of people.

“Nervous exhaustion. Of course, sweetie,” Phoebe said. “I stand corrected. Silly old me. I could get you a pattern? Some wool?” “Gee-whiz, that would be swell, Phoebe.” Skylar would rather stick pins in her eyes. She had no intention of cross-stitching big pink flowers on to cushion covers. The very idea made her mad. Or “cross”, as they said here. Ha, ha. Skylar preferred to go to her trailer between takes, kick everyone out, pop a couple of Vicodin and watch DVDs of Days of Our Lives that Mom recorded for her. Skylar had been in it for a year when she was 13, playing a kid who was a runaway. That was after years of modelling. “The Crisco Kid” her mother called her but actually she’d lost out on that one to a Scarlett Johansson type. Or maybe it was Scarlett Johansson. For someone with so little past there seemed to be an awful lot of it that Skylar couldn’t remember. Days of Our Lives got them out of the trailer park for good and Mom out of the Piggly Wiggly and now Mom was a realtor and wore red lipstick to work every day and had a real nice house in Orange County, all thanks to Skylar. “Don’t mention the trailer park in interviews, Skylar,” Marty said. But why not? It was the American dream to escape the trailer park and Skylar was the all-American girl.

She yawned and her make-up girl had to stop applying her lipstick. Skylar was so tired. She was making movies back to back because she was real hot at the moment. “Everyone wants you,” Marty said. Yeah, sure, everyone who made money out of her. In the mirror she could see her English assistant (Christie? Kirsty?) smiling encouragingly at her. She was holding the biggest umbrella Skylar had ever seen.

“Ready, Miss Schiller?”

Skylar sighed and hitched up her breasts. “Yeah. As I’ll ever be.”

They didn’t wrap until five. Skylar had to get a car back to the Covent Garden Hotel, have her hair and make-up done, choose from the dresses her stylist had been given and be in Leicester Square by eight o’clock. She had another PA waiting for her at the hotel, but he was her friend as well - Marshall. He’d been a kid actor too and a Mousketeer in the Time of Britney. Now he just got paid to hang out with Skylar to stop her dying of boredom and when her stylist wasn’t around he was pretty good at picking out clothes. Plus, of course he was a walking drugstore, although most of what Skylar needed was on prescription. She had a great physician back home in LA. He was called Dr Morris and he really listened to Skylar and gave her all kinds of stuff that helped take the edge off and even out the day.

In the end they’d ditched the horse and Skylar just ran down the hill (pretty difficult in that dress), which everyone said looked better after all. Everyone except the director, but what did he know? He was, as they said here, a wanker. A real jerkoff. His last movie went straight to DVD and Skylar wouldn’t be surprised if this one did too. “The studio needs a tax writeoff,” Marshall said, “and honey, I think you’re it.” (”Don’t listen to that little fag,” Marty said. “He pours evil like poison in your ear.” Marty could talk pretty fancy when he wanted to.) “Remember Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette?” Marshall said. “‘Nuff said, honey.”

Her assistant held the umbrella over her while she walked from her trailer to the car. Skylar had asked for some kind of screen so no one could see her on this little journey but it never happened. So maybe she wasn’t A-list enough. Someone was going to have to have a word with someone.

“Have a nice time, Miss Schiller,” her assistant said as Skylar got into the car.

“Yeah, thanks, Kirsty.” “It’s Karen, Miss Schiller. But it doesn’t matter, you can call me whatever you want.” (Jeez, imagine being that desperate.) Skylar decided she’d give her something real nice when they finished shooting. She had a Birkin bag someone had given her that was worth a fortune. Skylar already had two.

“Skylar! Skylar! This way, Skylar! Skylar, Skylar, over here! Skylar, look at me, darlin’!”

You got used to it. It went with the territory, as Phoebe would have said. Her co-star (gay, married, bozo) walked down the red carpet with his hand in the small of her back. She was supposed to do the walk on her own. Harry and Marty would be furious.

She was wearing a cute Stella McCartney dress and a pair of peep-toe Louboutins that were a half-size too big. She’d had two Oxycontin and a half a bottle of champagne before leaving the hotel and was feeling pleasantly floaty. She slept through most of the movie, despite Marty pinching her on one side and Harry on the other, and before she knew it they were back in the Dorchester for the premiere party. Marshall was there, thank the Lord, and gave her some Exefor to keep her going.

Marty and Harry were pretty happy and everyone kept saying how great she was in the movie. Of course, they always said that. She flirted a little with a lot of guys and then this one guy came up and said, “Do I know you?” He was real, real English. When Skylar was a kid Mom had taken on three jobs so she could afford a voice coach to “get the Georgia out of” Skylar and they’d done a lot of that “rain on the Spanish plain” stuff. Skylar had thought it would come in handy for In a Time of Madness but the voice coach on that movie (another friend of Hitler’s) said, “Forget everything anyone has ever taught you, Miss Schiller.” As if.

The real, real English guy was still standing there like a dork, creasing his brow like a bad actor and saying, “I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before,” so Skylar said, “I’m Skylar Schiller - ” all polite because that’s how Mom raised her, but really, how could he not know who she was when for the last two hours he’d been looking at her face blown up a zillion times? (Although, of course, she’d been dressed down as a spy, which, according to the movie was not a glamorous occupation. No siree.)

He was ordinary-looking but there was something about him that was familiar. Skylar was pretty sure she hadn’t slept with him.

He laughed and said, “No, no, no, just joking, of course I know who you are - God - I’d have to have been living at the North Pole for the last two years if I didn’t know who you were. I’m a huge fan, I was really concerned when you were taken into hospital, are you all better now? Is it Schiller like the poet?”

All this without taking a breath! A lot of people in England asked about Schiller the poet (and, no, Skylar wasn’t related to him), no one in the States ever mentioned him. And then he was off again, “‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’ and all that,” he said. He flushed as pink as a shrimp when Skylar smiled at him and said, “Yeah. That too.” They were right, the English really did speak a different language.

She was looking around the room for Marshall to come and rescue her when who should pop up out of nowhere but Phoebe Something-Or-Other. She was dressed as if she’d been involved in a terrible accident in a fabric mill, bits of chiffon trailing everywhere. She smiled at Skylar, showing horrible yellow teeth - didn’t they have orthodontists in this country? - and said, “Have you been introduced properly to His Royal Highness?”

Well, you could have knocked Skylar down with a feather.

“I was a good friend of his grandmother,” Phoebe said before scooting off again, hanging on to her glass of gin as if she was on a Ouija board.

“So … ” Skylar said. Was she supposed to curtsy? She gave a tiny little bob, just in case. “So, Prince … ” Which one was he? The one who was going to be King one day or the other one? She was suddenly aware of the big wad of gum in her mouth. It didn’t seem appropriate when you were talking (possibly) to the future King of England.

“Prince Alfred, but please call me Alfie.”

“So, Prince Alfie … I didn’t know they let you go to movies and that kind of stuff.” Oh real lame, Skylar, real lame.

“Oh, we get let out occasionally,” he laughed. “And it’s just Alfie.”

“OK, just Alfie.”

“I’m a huge fan, did I say that?”

“Yeah.” He looked a whole lot cuter now that he was royal.

“Skylar. Like skylark,” he said. “But without the K,” Skylar pointed out.

“I thought you were a blonde,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of her hair.

“I’m not really anything,” Skylar said. “I’m whatever they want me to be.”

“Mm. Me too,” he said. “Shall we get out of here? Go to a club or something?”

“People will talk,” Skylar said, suddenly, unaccountably nervous.

“People are talking,” he said.

“I have to be home by midnight, or I turn into a pumpkin,” Skylar said. She wanted him to think she was funny. Or interesting. Or something.

“Actually, I think it’s the carriage that turns into a pumpkin,” he said. “We’ve got one like that.”

On the Pont-Neuf, two gendarmes roller-bladed past them. They made it look chic. Only the French could do that, Campbell thought. She needed hot tea. She felt nauseous with tiredness and jet-lag. Or maybe she was coming down with something. Think how many germs you shared on a transatlantic flight. Millions probably. “I need tea,” she said to Joel.

“Sure,” he said.

“Can we look for a cafe?”

Joel sighed. Campbell knew he was contemplating the unwelcome idea of negotiating food and drink with a Parisian. When they were here last time, five years ago on honeymoon, everyone had seemed charming and friendly, now the same people (more or less) were surly and uncommunicative. Between them she and Joel had pretty good French - when he was a child Joel lived in Switzerland because his father was something big in international banking and Campbell had majored in European languages at Brown before she fast-tracked law - but when they started speaking to anyone in French they cut them off impatiently as soon as they heard the American in their voices. The irony was that then they started talking to them in their appalling English! Twenty-four hours and the French were already “they” and “them” - the enemy.

“At least they don’t smoke in cafes any more,” Campbell said encouragingly.

It wasn’t until they’d walked almost all the way back to their hotel near the Madeleine that they found somewhere both of them were prepared to compromise on. The window was full of exquisite cakes that were like works of art, that were works of art. They ignited a kind of mad desire in Campbell, made her feel so greedy that she wanted to eat every cake in the window.

“This one then?” she said, feigning indifference.

“Sure,” Joel said, not feigning indifference. He didn’t have a sweet tooth.

He’d been in a bad mood ever since they landed on French soil. Their luggage had gone missing at Charles de Gaulle and it had made him endlessly fretful. But it turned up this morning at the hotel and when they opened their suitcases their neat, pressed clothes (irredeemably American) were all present and correct so he really didn’t have to keep going on about it. All the time looking for something to complain about. She supposed he had been argumentative for weeks, but here, removed from his everyday New York context, his petulance seemed to pervade everything.

They’d spent their honeymoon in a quaint little hotel in the Marais but it was fully booked this week and they had ended up in a middle-of-the-range place that seemed characterless in comparison. Breakfast this morning had been a rather spare buffet - little pats of foil-wrapped butter still hard from the freezer, greasy pastries and a bowl of fruit salad that surely hadn’t been made fresh that morning. Only the coffee had passed muster, although Joel had to ask twice for a refill from the crabby woman in charge. In their hotel in the Marais they had taken breakfast in a little open-air courtyard at the back of the hotel, the walls of which were covered in vines. But that had been June and this was inhospitable November and the breakfast room was in a dimly lit old cave beneath the building. Their fellow guests, a German family and a group of Japanese businessmen, seemed dispirited and subdued, as if they too had realised they should never have come here.

The morning sky was opaque, the colour of Tupperware. It threatened rain all the time as they walked to Les Invalides. (”Let’s not revisit anything,” Campbell had said, leafing through their Eyewitness Guide to Paris on the plane. “We should go to places we didn’t do last time.”)

“Maybe there was a good reason for not coming here before,” Joel said as they wandered listlessly round an exhibit in Les Invalides about Paris during the second world war. “I mean it’s pretty depressing.”

“Well, war is depressing,” Campbell said. Last time they had taken a bateau-mouche along the Seine and they had held hands in the sunshine and Campbell had rested her head on Joel’s shoulder and felt she’d arrived at the place she was supposed to be.

Campbell spent so long contemplating Napoleon’s weird, enormous tomb - strange to think what a small man was inside it - that when she looked around she could find no sign of Joel. They never stuck together in galleries and museums but nor did they stray too far from each other. Campbell used to think there was an invisible cord that bound them, one to another. Not this time apparently. Half an hour later and she still hadn’t come across him. She went outside and hung around for a while, looking out for his familiar figure. She had left her cell in the hotel safe so she had no way of contacting him, she hadn’t thought she would need to.

Then the clouds finally broke so she headed for a cafe. It was crowded and steamy but she managed to find a table and ordered a coffee and something big and gooey that just about put her into a diabetic coma. Back home in Manhattan she would have been eating grilled chicken or fish, a salad on the side. Here it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Her mind felt cool and uncluttered without Joel. There were empty places inside her that he usually filled. Or perhaps there was just less of her without him. That was not necessarily a bad thing.

Five years since they were married, a big ceremony in the Hamptons, on the lawn of a house owned by friends of Joel’s parents. Juliet roses, a quartet playing Mozart, dress by Vera Wang. The whole shebang. If that Campbell could have seen herself five years into the future she would have expected a child by now, a dog at least. A house with a yard. Just went to show.

She ordered another cup of coffee. Campbell never simply sat, never wasted time. There was always something to occupy her, papers or files, or if not work then a dinner party to go to, or to cook for, a movie to see, a show. Talking, reading, writing, thinking, always talking. Even when they made love she and Joel talked to each other. Maybe they’d talked too much, maybe that was why they had run out of words.

People came and went. Food was eaten, checks were paid, tips were left. Time was wasted. Campbell had another cup of coffee. Was it worth trying to order decaff? Probably not, she imagined that the French scoffed at decaff.

She was both anchored and adrift. In the old world. An American in Paris. She should have a book with her. She should be reading James or Hemingway. Or maybe not.

It was nearly five o’clock by the time she meandered back to the hotel. Joel was lying on the bed watching an incomprehensible French quiz on TV. He glanced at her briefly and said, “Why did you leave me in Les Invalides?” and she said, “I didn’t. You left me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

They could have gone on for ever like that, Campbell supposed, batting right and wrong backwards and forwards, but she just didn’t care enough to keep returning the argument. She went into the bathroom, stripped off and stepped into the shower.

He wasn’t the heir, he was “the spare”. That meant that if his brother Prince James (”Jamie”) died, Alfie would be King. So only a teeny-tiny step away. Of course, the old King, their father (”Papa”), would have to die first. After Alfie it was some crazy cousin of their father’s. (”The line of succession” it was called.) Jamie and Alfie weren’t allowed to travel on the same plane because no one wanted the crazy cousin to inherit the throne if they went down together in flames. It was all written down in stone thousands of years ago. Skylar found it real interesting, being with Alfie was like being with living history. He was fun though, not like Jamie who was very solemn, like he already had that big, old, heavy crown weighing his head down. She didn’t meet the King because he was off on tour somewhere but she did go to an official dinner where she was camouflaged (as Alfie put it) by the presence of lots of other celebrities. She was seated between the deputy prime minister and a man who made giant sculptures from trash. The flatware was gold.

Skylar had to be smuggled in and out of the palace. (The palace! It was awesome!) She hadn’t told Mom yet because Alfie said it was very important that their love was kept a secret and if Mom knew about it she’d be on the cover of the Enquirer shooting her mouth off about “Queen Skylar”.

They wrapped. Finally. And the rain stopped and Skylar had two whole weeks to herself. And, by chance, Alfie had two whole weeks too. He was in the military. He’d just finished learning to be a soldier and now he was going to go on to learn to be a sailor. And after that, maybe a pilot. It was like they were expecting him to fight a war single-handed.

The English summer seemed to be a pretty busy time for people like Jamie and Alfie and their friends - a lot of boating and horse racing and garden parties which Skylar thought would be cool but Alfie said, “God, I don’t want to parade you round the season, I just want you to myself.” So they went and stayed in what he called a cottage but what Skylar would have called a mansion on “the Sandringham estate” (it took her a while to work that one out).

Skylar didn’t bother with make-up. She wore jeans or nothing. She didn’t even need any pills, just a couple of Vicodin now and then. A woman (Sonia? Sylvia?) came every day in a big SUV and left meals for them in the kitchen. Someone came in and cleaned, but real quiet, so you wouldn’t know they were there.

They had a lot of sex and when they were worn out with the sex they went into the woods and shot things. Skylar was a good shot, she’d been taught by a step-daddy called Hoyt, but she refused to kill anything as pretty as a deer so they just aimed at tin cans. “You’re good,” Alfie said. “Between us we could take on the world.” Sometimes they took a picnic into the woods. Of course, they were never really alone, there were security guys everywhere, but Skylar was used to being watched by people.

She liked waking up every morning and seeing Alfie’s cheerful face looking down at her. He woke up early, he said Eton had done that to him. Eton is a school. It was funny how when you got real fond of someone they started to look handsome. She began to imagine she could do this for ever. They’d get married and have little princes and princesses and Skylar would wear tweed and maybe even learn cross-stitch.

And then one morning Skylar, butt-naked, opened the door to Sonia/Silvia and, hey presto, the next morning, there was her photograph in one of the papers that a security guy showed them. “Royal love nest,” it said. And a whole lot of other stuff as well, obviously.

There was a huge fuss, breach of royal security, Alfred could have been shot with a gun not a camera, et cetera, but a lot more column inches devoted to Skylar, of course. Alfie was real upset. “They can’t let me have anything,” he said. “Even you.” “Especially not me,” Skylar said.

Then it just went crazy, they were in every newspaper and celebrity magazine. Skylar thought she was famous before but this was awesome. She turned her cell off. Otherwise it just rang off the hook. Marty and Harry, Marshall, her Mom, hundreds of other people who all depended on Skylar. Their two weeks was up. She was supposed to be in LA, shooting had already started on her new movie. Alfie was supposed to be on a ship somewhere. Instead they were holed up on “the Sandringham estate” like outlaws. “We can’t stay here for ever,” Skylar said to Alfie and he said, “Why not?” and she felt real sad because she knew he really wanted to stay here for ever with her. And he knew he couldn’t.

Then Skylar opened the door again. Fully clothed, she’d learnt her lesson, and who was standing there? Only the King with a capital “K”.

“Can I come in?” he asked. As if he didn’t own the place!

“Sure, your Royal Majesty,” Skylar said. (She’d been learning all the right things to say. Just in case.) “Alfie’s in the bathtub. Shall I get him?”

Turned out it was her he’d come to see. He wanted “a word”. About how the monarchy was “being brought into disrepute”. How things were pretty bad anyway for them (really?) without “this kind of scandal”. He was nice, she liked him, she could tell he didn’t want to upset her. He did though.

“Gee-whiz, Your Majesty,” Skylar said. “We’re just two young people who love each other, we shouldn’t have to battle the whole world.” This was a line from a teen movie she’d done way back when, but she reckoned it was a pretty safe bet that the King hadn’t seen it.

He had an attaché case with him and he fished inside it and came up with a DVD that looked blank and said, “Do you know what I have here?”

“A blank DVD?”

“No, I’m afraid there is a film on it, Miss Schiller. Here are some stills from it,” he said, digging into his case again. He handed over a folder of photographs to Skylar and said, “Recognise them?”

It was just a movie. A lot of people got started that way. True, she was only 15 and she’d lied about her age. It was just before the Dr Pepper commercial when she thought she was never going to break into the big time. And, OK, so the sex in the movie was real but it wasn’t as if she’d never had sex before (”You may as well be paid for it,” Mom said) and it wasn’t for distribution, just for some rich guy who wanted to star in his own porno show and was prepared to pay real big bucks for the privilege of doing it with Skylar in every room in his house. (It was a pretty big house.) Yeah, and so what if some of it wasn’t very nice, life wasn’t very nice, was it? And she’d managed to erase it from her head and now here was the King of England, no less, showing her a reminder of it.

It wasn’t pretty. (Did he watch the whole thing? The scene in the bathroom?)

“I can have it held back,” he said. “It’s in all our interests. But only if you give him up. And believe me, Miss Schiller, I say that knowing how much pain it will cause the pair of you.”

“We have to sacrifice our love?” Skylar said, which was another line from the movie. The teen one, not the porno one.

By the time Alfie was out of the bathtub his “Papa” had gone and Skylar was the one who had to tell him that she didn’t love him any more. And it was only when she said the words, and watched his face crumple like a kid’s, that she realised that the words were a lie. Love pinched her heart. They said love hurt, and it turns out it did. Who knew?

A dead sky. Everything flat, like white paint. They endured a terrible afternoon at Versailles. Even getting inside was an endurance test in their ongoing stand-off with the French. “Why can’t they just have a sign that says Entrée?” Joel fumed. “Everything’s so perversely illogical with the French.” They didn’t like Versailles, it was big and overblown, like every other European palace they’d ever been to. They’d done Europe one summer when they were students. They’d only had one day in Paris, that was one of the reasons they had come back here on honeymoon.

Campbell liked Le Petit Trianon, it was pretty and orderly and there was a cute donkey. She fed potato chips to the fish in the stream.

“How can you like it?” Joel said. “It’s artificial, a pretend place for a woman who was - rightly - doomed.” Yesterday they had argued about a friend who’d called their first child, a boy, “Giuseppe”. They weren’t Italian and Joel said the name was therefore “stupid” and “pretentious”. Campbell liked the name. She wondered what Joel would call a son if he had one. Not something Italian, apparently.

They were going to the Opera. The hotel concierge had got them expensive tickets to La Traviata and they got dressed up in their best clothes, which, being Americans, weren’t much different from their ordinary clothes and had schlepped along the road to the Palais Garnier which Campbell thought was a gorgeous building and Joel, of course, thought was “grotesquely overdone”. It turned out that it didn’t matter what it was because it was the wrong building.

“Jesus Christ,” Joel said. “Didn’t you check?”

“Me?”

They managed to haul themselves into a cab and get to the Opera Bastille which Campbell thought was a soulless modern building and Joel thought was contemporary and sensible. They were cross and sweaty and only made it to their seats (right in the middle of a row, of course, and after many “Excusez-mois”) with seconds to spare before curtain up.

“Which opera is La Traviata?” Campbell whispered as the overture struck up. She wasn’t good with opera. Joel’s parents had season tickets to the Met because that was the kind of people they were.

“Tragic inappropriate love, abandonment, death,” he whispered back. “Yes, but which one?”

It was some kind of bank holiday in England and they were showing 101 Dalmatians in the middle of the afternoon. Skylar and Marshall watched it on the hotel TV. He’d been a real friend. The security guys had driven her back to London yesterday and dropped her off at a hotel, “very discreet, in Knightsbridge” one of them said to her. She wasn’t sure who was picking up the check. She was flying out tomorrow. Both Marty and Harry said they were going to be at the airport to meet her and then she had to be straight on set next morning. They made it sound like she was going to be locked up and they were her jailers.

And so much for His Almighty Majesty being able to suppress anything because clips from that movie were all over the internet. Apparently it was called The Baron (Skylar didn’t know it was called anything) and everyone was guessing who “the Baron” was but Skylar remembered that was what he called his doohickey.

“You mean his dick?” Marshall said, lighting up a joint. Skylar never did dope, she didn’t believe in taking drugs.

“Can we not talk about it any more? Please?” It was all shameful and horrible, worse than anything Lindsay or Britney, or even Paris, had ever done.

She took a couple of Xanax and then a couple more when they didn’t kick in. They got through a lot of champagne before Cruella de Vil was vanquished. Marshall gave her some Oxycontin and then they got steak and fries on room service and more champagne, chased with a couple of Adderall. Then Marshall went to sleep at the end of Skylar’s Emperor bed and she popped a couple of Ambien and phoned Mom but she wasn’t in. Skylar was asleep before Mom got to the end of her answerphone message. She was real tired. Real, real tired.

“I hate modern interpretations,” Joel said in the interval. They stayed in their seats. Campbell would have liked a drink but not enough to get up and fight her way through to the bar. And Joel wasn’t offering to go, which he would have done once.

“It’s so self-referential,” he said. “I mean why can’t Violetta just be Violetta? Nineteenth-century courtesan, or whatever she was. Big dress, fans. Why does it have to be drugs and Hollywood and all that minimalism. The British royal family, for Christ’s sake.”

“Why does it make you so mad?” Campbell said. “It’s just an opera.”

“Everything makes me mad.”

“Especially me?”

He made a funny little jerking motion with his head which could have been interpreted in a number of ways. And then the interval was over.

Skylar felt real comfortable. Like she had no worries and someone was taking care of her. Someone was taking care of her, lots of someones. Nurses and doctors and she could tell they all had her best interests at heart. A machine was keeping her going. She could hear the tick and hiss of it. She loved that machine. Her Mom was there. Harry and Marty were in and out. Marshall had come with her in the ambulance but Marty had kicked him out. Kirsty or whatever her name had been here and Skylar remembered she hadn’t given her the Birkin bag at the end of the shoot. She felt real bad about that. She hoped it wouldn’t count against her.

She heard Phoebe Something-Or-Other’s theatrical voice saying, “Poor lamb, I just brought her this,” and one of the nurses said, “It’s lovely to meet you, Miss Hope-Walters, I’m such a fan.”

He never came. Alfie. Skylar supposed he wasn’t allowed. He would have come if he could have done, she was sure. She loved him. It was one true thought and it lived inside her and made her shine with light.

Campbell didn’t think the story had been cheapened. It moved her in a way she simply hadn’t expected. When it came to the deathbed scene she couldn’t hold back a noisy, hiccupy sob and she saw Joel shrink away from her in embarrassment. Part of her had been hoping the ending would change. It was tragic. It felt more real than her own life. Perhaps that was the tragedy.

She was real, real sorry for the way things had turned out. If she had her time over she would do things differently, but it didn’t really matter now. A life was what you made of it. And Skylar had done her best. But gee-whiz, she sure would have liked a bit more time. She hoped there was a heaven and that she’d done enough to get in. She hoped there would be dogs (no horses!) and she could eat all she wanted without getting any heavier.

And then he was there! She heard a nurse murmur, “Your Royal Highness,” and then she felt him take her hand. He was crying and his hot, wet tears fell on her skin and burned right through to her bones and she felt the light inside her again.

It was funny but right at the end, after her lovely machine was switched off (by Mom) it was as if she was right there, awake and alive, and the last thing she saw was this cushion with a big pink rose cross-stitched on it. It was ugly. Real, real ugly. But as Mom would have said, “It’s the thought that counts.” And then that was it. The End.

• Public booking for the Glyndebourne 75th anniversary season opens Saturday 18 April. Box office 01273 813813, glyndebourne.com

After 44 years of meticulous study, the Dictionary of American Regional English is nearing completion. But what about Britain’s precious local dialects? After a slightly shorter period of research, a zaggled Stuart Jeffries quimbles about a wallage of blaefummery

One day in the village of Embleton in Northumberland, lexicographical researchers heard a local say the following: “I’ll dad your lugs.” It means, roughly, “I’ll give you a clip round the ears.” It’s significant - isn’t it? - that the verb for hitting in this sentence is “dad”. If anybody said “I’ll mum your lugs” (which I don’t believe they have), it would sound more like an endearment.

In the nearby village of Wark, researchers heard another bizarre sentence: “She’s got a clew in her bottom.” It meant: “She’s got a swelling in her bottom.” It was said of children who would not sit still.

These expressions were collected by fieldworkers for the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) when they were compiling a Survey of English Dialects in the 50s. In Stewkley in Buckinghamshire, for example, they found that the local word for a buttercup was “crazy”. In Docking, Norfolk, they heard the expression “couldn’t stop a pea” and learned that it was said of a bow-legged person. In the delightfully named Staffordshire village of Mow Cop, to have “cocked your toes” meant to have died. In Wiltshire, the hands of a woman that had been in the washtub a long time were called “quobbled” (ie temporarily wrinkly).

For a wulfrunian like me, one of the great pleasures of reading the survey (to do so, go to www.leeds.ac.uk/english/activities/lavc/index and follow the links) is to discover in how many other parts of the country people say, or at least said, “babbie” for baby and “mom” for mum. In Wolverhampton in the 70s, I was always scandalised that I could never find a greeting card reading “Happy birthday mom”, and I never even bothered to look for one congratulating parents on their “new babbie”.

Similarly, my partner, who comes from one of the rough parts of Cumbria (between Sellafield and Whitehaven) is forever counting things in the old north country sheep-farmer vernacular: instead of saying “one, two, three, four, five”, she says “yan, tan, tether, mether, pip”. It slays me every time. In Lancashire, that counting system is even more delectably barmy. Pimp, dik and bumpit sound like a firm of misogynistic hip-hop lawyers, but they were actually olden-days Lancashire numbers for counting sheep. “Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, teezar, leezar, cattera, horna, dik, yandik, tandik, tetherdik, bumpit, yan-a-bumpit, tan-a-bumpit, tethera-bumpit, methera-bumpit, jigot.” It still sounds to me like the unexpurgated version of In Da Club.

Earlier this week there was news that will surely make British lexicographers grab their tape recorders and questionnaires and head back out into the field again. In the US, the final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (aka Dare), covering the letters S to Z, is nearing completion after 44 years in gestation and should be published by the end of next year. Dare will include such lovely expressions as “whiffle-minded” (which in Maine means vacillating), and the “devil-strip” (which in Ohio means the grass verge between the pavement and the road). In Pennsylvania, one GP heard a patient say: “Doc, I’ve been riftin’ and I’ve got jags in my leaders” (which meant that he had been belching and had pain in his tendons). Dare aims to chart the idiosyncracies of regional speech.

Surely we should have a similar project in Britain; a book that sorts out some of the great imponderables of British English once and for all. For instance, why people are sent to Coventry rather than say - ooh - Smethwick, which surely would be much worse?

Why, I ask the curator of sociolinguistics at the British Library, is there not yet a similar book over here called The Dictionary of British Regional English? Surely our dialects are as rich in variation, if not richer, than their American counterparts?

“Well,” says Jonnie Robinson, “that’s true. American English has only been going for about 400 years, whereas British English is much, much older, so to compile a historically accurate dictionary of British Regional English would take a lot of time and money.”

But lots of work is in fact being done to record and celebrate the jewels of British dialects: there is Robinson and his team at the British Library, the research being done under the aegis of dialectologist Professor Clive Upton at Leeds University, and many others, among them Susie Dent, probably best known as the lexicographer on TV’s Countdown. “Contrary to what most of us think, local dialects are alive and kicking,” she says. “Not only that, but they’re evolving all the time, especially as kids are mixing them up with slang and producing new variations of the old all the time.”

Dent sends me a few lovely examples from her book on British dialects, How To Talk Like a Local (to be published by Random House next year). Some of them, she says sadly, have fallen into obscurity - at least until now. “Cat melodeon” meant terrible or appalling in Northern Ireland. Vexingly, Dent says, the term’s etymology is uncertain. “Among suggestions and local myths is the supposed tendency of accordion (or melodeon) players to fluff their notes, as well as the terrible howling of a cat on heat.” Then there’s “tittamorter”, which meant seesaw in East Anglia, while in Durham, Dent tells me, the seesaw is a “shig-shog”. In Liverpool, a wimp or fool is sometimes known as a “quilt”, suggesting that the person is soft. In Yorkshire a mischievous child was known as a “skopadiddle”. The Scottish term for nonsense was once “blaefummery”.

“Some words just seem born for their task,” says Dent, “and the echoic blaefummery is one of them. It is an extension of blaflum (or bleflum/blaeflum), meaning a deception, a hoax, nonsense, or illusion; as a verb it means to cajole or impose upon. There seems to be no indisputable origin: blae means blue or livid - in colour, that is - but perhaps one can see some relation to flummery, flattery, empty talk or humbug, and which word has the charm of having started off its life meaning food, whether made of oatmeal or flour, milk and eggs.”

There are so many regional variations for words and phrases around the UK, says Robinson, that what is needed is not just a dictionary but a compendium of maps. “A map of the word ’splinter’, for example, would show that it was called ’shiver’ in East Anglia and ’spell’ in London.” It sounds like a great idea. Indeed, Robinson and his team at the British Library have already had a rough online stab at producing a map of British lexical variations (much more fun than it sounds - check it out at www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/regional-voices/lexical-variation/). It tells you, for instance, that in Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire, the word “snob” meant - at least until recently - a bootmaker. It also quotes someone from Lerwick on the Shetland Isles saying: “When I was peerie, before I was allowed to go out, then we stood in the windows, because folk had torches, they’d blinkies.” I don’t pretend to know what they’re on about, but I look forward to finding out.

There have been several attempts to give snapshots of British English. Robinson says that between 1898 and 1905, the Oxford professor of comparative philology, Joseph Wright, edited a six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, initially at his own expense. “He sent lots of researchers out around the country and the result was a leather-bound bible of dialects in the UK. Of course, it was mostly about 19th-century usage, but it was wonderful.” This formed the prototype for later lexicographical fieldwork projects such as the Leeds Survey of Regional English.

More recently, lexicographers have been culling dialect expressions from the BBC Voices of the UK project. This involved recordings made by BBC local radio journalists in 2004 and 2005 talking to people around the country about their dialects and attitudes to language. Lexicographers at Leeds University and the British Library are now using these recordings as part of their research into regional British dialects. Upton and a team at Leeds is now undertaking a survey of regional English. So there is a lot of scholarly work being done, all of which is yet to be published.

Here, in the meantime, is my A to Z of a few funtime regional English phrases, culled mostly from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture but also from other sources compiled with the help of Robinson and his team at the British Library, and Dent. The Americans took 44 years to assemble their A to Z of Regional American English; this one took about 44 minutes. As a result, it is what they call in Lincolnshire a “whim-wham”, which means a trifle. (Whim-wham has synonyms around the UK such as flim-flam, jim-jam and trim-tram - all of which apply equally to what follows).

A

Aboon above (Yorkshire); agate busy, on the go (Lancashire); ahint behind (Durham)

anywhen anytime (Dorset)

B

Boily food (Northumberland); body horse third horse in tandem team of four, or middle horse of three (Oxfordshire); bobkin team of three horses with two in front (Surrey); bodkin part of a plough harness (Lincolnshire); beat the devil round the gooseberry bush to drag something out (Sussex)

C

Crawlers men who shear sheep on the ground (Norfolk); cobble mucus in the corner of the eye in the morning (Gloucestershire); cock one’s toes to die (Staffordshire)

D

Dobby ghost (Lake District); darricky rotten - of wood (Sherborne); dimpsy dark - of twilight (Devon); down the banks getting annoyed with (Liverpool)

E

Edging mittens fingerless gloves (Yorkshire); eve to water (Lancashire); emmet an ant, or a tourist (Cornwall - the same as “grockles” in Devon to describe any tourist or outsider)

F

Fay top rock of a slate quarry (Lancashire); fromward away from (Oxfordshire)

G

Gladmelshed easily milked cow (Coniston, Lake District).

H

Hoggerdemow tool for cutting sides of stack (Gloucestershire); hooter owl (Staffordshire)

I

It is also (Devon).

J

Johnny Ball type of binder twine (Lancashire).

K

Capital “K” legs said of a person whose left leg is knock-kneed but whose right leg is straight (Yorkshire)

L

Larrup to drink excessively (Worcestershire)

loo to be subject to a forfeit at cards (Devon).

M

Muffatee cuffs worn round wrists in cold weather (Cumbria); mawkin mop used to clean oven (Gloucestershire); meg-ullat owl (Lincolnshire)

N

Nither to perish, to be starved with cold (Durham); naught naughty - of child (Staffordshire)

O

Often also (Devon); orrack to break up cow dung with fork (Audlem, Cheshire)

P

Paunch to trample (Devon); peelie-wallie pale; sickly (Scotland)

Q

Quaggle to shake like a jelly (Berkshire, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex): the same word means to strangle in Norfolk; quimble to fondle, caress, to say nice things, eg in phrase to quimble and quamble (Lancashire); quobbled of a woman’s hands: shrivelled and wrinkled from being too long in the washtub (Wiltshire)

R

Rummage rubbish as in “Much odds for bad rummage” - an equivalent to “Good riddance to bad rubbish” (Devon)

S

Scammered drunk (Lincolnshire); snotter to hit on the nose (Lancashire); slingers bread soaked in tea (Dorset)

T

Thrum strong, vigorous, lush - of overgrown corn (Worcestershire); thick there that (Dorset)

U

Umblement quantity that is only just sufficient (Kent); ugly-tempered bad-tempered (Wiltshire)

V

Venner to scowl (Lincolnshire)

W

Wally pile of mown grass (Bretforton, Worcestershire); water whelp

dumpling (Lincolnshire); wallage of

lot of, great deal of (Devon)

X

X truce term accompanied by crossed fingers, called out by children to indicate exemption from capture in chase games (Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire). In other parts of the country, the truce term could be scribs, skinch, cree, kings, full stop, pax or barley

Y

Yoke working day (Lincolnshire); yule dough currant bread in shape of man (Durham)

Z

Ziddow of peas: good for boiling; of land: good for growing peas in (Gloucestershire); zaggle to confuse, especially by contradictory assertions, also known as ziggle (Cheshire)

Zig/got the zig annoyed - thought to be rhyming slang from Sigmund Freud (London).

Ayn Rand’s libertarian rant is unpleasant, daft and deeply flawed. I hated it - but I couldn’t put it down

If recent reports are to be believed, people have started seeing parallels between our current economic meltdown and the world collapse outlined in the 1200 pages of Ayn Rand’s libertarian classic Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s fans proclaim her a prophet - the hero whose teachings will rid us of recession. This sudden popularity is odd (why seek salvation from a situation caused by out of control markets in a book preaching less market regulation?) but it’s also intriguing. And so it was that I recently became one of the millions who have set out to discover the answer to the book’s opening question: “Who is John Galt?”.

Galt, it transpires (after 700-odd pages of hard yakka) is “Prometheus who changed his mind”. A man who has refused to accept the increasing socialisation of American society in Rand’s bleak future, who has “taken away his fire” and gone on strike. Living on the principle that “I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”, he’s retreated to the Colorado mountains, along with his great big brain and a super-efficient energy generator of his own invention. He has also encouraged several other similar heroes to join him. These are all supermen: supremely intelligent, rich, very good-looking and clever. Without them the world outside begins to collapse and destroy itself, as a collection of two-dimensional “college educated” caricatures pass increasingly idiotic legislation in the name of “essential need”, and feed ever more hungrily on the few producers whom Galt has not yet taken to Colorado.

Chief among the latter is the focus of the novel, the acting vice-president of a railroad, Dagny Taggart. She is just like the other supermen except she takes a long time to be persuaded to join Galt, she is beautiful instead of handsome and enjoys being near-raped by whomsoever appears to have the greatest earning potential. In Rand’s world, dollars are the ultimate in sex appeal and sex is dark, kinky and weird. But not in a good way.

It’s as unpleasant as it is daft and as a work of literature it’s deeply flawed. Great chunks of the book are given over to philosophical rants (one particularly egregious radio broadcast clocks in at just under 100 pages). There are countless tedious repetitions of ideas, phrases and situations. Rand’s world is a place of black and white morality, good and bad people and absolutely no shades of grey. Consequently, none of the characters or storylines are at all believable.

To top all that off, the writing is turned up to eleven throughout. It is, as Whittaker Chambers noted in this justly celebrated article in the National Review, a work of “shrillness without reprieve”.

It’s also, as millions have discovered before me, strangely compelling. Rand may be shrill, but the high-pitched urgency of her writing and uncomplicated morality also gives the book an irresistible force. It might take 900 pages too many to properly reveal the workings of John Galt, but it’s an intriguing mystery. The conclusion might also be postponed in more than a dozen annoying ways, but Rand has a unique ability to bludgeon you along to it.

I hated the thing, but I couldn’t put it down. It was worth the effort too, because the conclusion is one of the funniest things I’ve read. This mad denouement boasted, among other idiotic delights, a particle destroyer, a mad electric torture machine, gratuitous nudity, a laboratory, and a man who introduces himself in the heat of battle in all seriousness as “Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia”.

Such laughs, however, come bitterly, given how seriously so many take this stuff. There is one thing Rand gets right (and, typically, repeats ad nauseam): people are frequently nuts and the ridiculous can happen. The cruel irony is that the true absurdity lies in Rand’s insistence on selfishness, the need to create wealth at the expense of all else and the prohibition on sharing it – as recent events have shown.

Indeed, Rand’s new acolytes all seem to overlook the one true link between the writer and the current recession: Alan Greenspan. He was one of Rand’s foremost disciples, not to mention her main source of economic advice. He is also now widely viewed as one of the main triggers of the recession. This being the case, turning to Atlas Shrugged because you don’t like the way things are going is the equivalent of diving for the centre of the fire because the frying pan got too hot.

From Cheever to Murakami, debut novelist and coffee lover Benjamin Obler brews up the most aromatic mentions of coffee in literature

Coffee fanatic Benjamin Obler is originally from St Paul, Minnesota, and studied creative writing in Glasgow. His first novel, Javascotia, is published this week by Hamish Hamilton. It follows the story of a naive young American who travels from Chicago to Glasgow to set up a coffee franchise. Here Obler presents his notes on his favourite significant appearances of coffee in literature.

Buy Javascotia at the Guardian bookshop

1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Janie went down and the landlady made her drink some coffee with her because she said her husband was dead and it was bad to be having your morning coffee by yourself.

So clearly coffee is about companionship, and promotes healing. Coffee has a chameleon-like nature: though it’s the consummate non-prescription upper, it’s also a balm, a salve. It fosters community and the repair of sorrow. It is a bridge between the despairing and the hopeful. (This scene also contains, later on the page, the brilliant “sankled”, a combination of ambled and sank: “Janie sankled back to her room.”)

2. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

…he grew restless, attributing it to the coffee settling in his stomach.

Vladimir Girshkin suffers restlessness in varying degrees throughout the novel, except when he’s hungover, which is frequently in the last half of the book. But, crucially, this appearance of coffee is an early occurrence, when he is still in New York and restless in a larger sense. He’s unhappy with his girlfriend Challah, unhappy with his bickering parents and paranoid grandmother, and unhappy with his desk job at the Immigration Society. Coffee is a small measure of this generalised ennui - a microcosm. And it only stands to reason that he’s drinking coffee, as he’s numbed by romantic boredom, tired of bureaucratic red tape, and sexually stymied by his girlfriend’s occupational promiscuity (she’s a dominatrix). He seems to be living the American dream, yet it’s an American nightmare. A sleepless nightmare. He seeks stimulus, inspiration! He wants to be alert! The coffee doesn’t make him restless - it only awakens him to his true feelings. Thus coffee is a truth serum! Coffee lifts the veil of self-delusion!

3. Running Dog by Don DeLillo

Glen Selvy stuck his head around the edge of the partition to say good night. Lightborne asked him in for coffee, which was perking on a GE hotplate in a corner of the room. Selvy checked his watch and sat in a huge, dusty armchair … [Lightborne] poured three cups. Moll believed she detected an edge of detachment in Selvy’s voice and manner.

This appears relatively early. Interesting that it brings these three characters together: Selvy, tasked with covertly buying erotic art for a senator; Lightborne, the erotic art dealer; and Moll Robbins, the reporter doing the story on the sex business - whatever she can find. In a Psych 101 class 15 years ago, a professor gave an example of a psychological phenomenon, in which a man and woman meet over coffee, and their accelerated heart rates give them a false impression of excitement: they might mistake their physical symptoms as sexual arousal or emotional interest. Is that what happens here? Moll and Selvy later become involved romantically. Was the impetus a coffee-driven sense of arousal? The hotplate dates the story: 1978. “Perking” is interesting. DeLillo is too gruff to be satisfied with the domestic-sounding “percolating.” And of course perking is loaded. Coffee makes you perky and has its perks.

4. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

DECEMBER 16

I’m sick for real. Rosario is making me stay in bed. Before she left for work she went out to borrow a thermos from a neighbour and she left me half a litre of coffee. Also four aspirin. I have a fever. I’ve started and finished two poems.

Coffee as litmus test. Coffee as a baseline, a standard. A token of caring, requiring a suitable vessel. A lover wanting her coffee gift kept warm while she’s away. Does it stay in the thermos? Does it grow cold? Coffee appears in many scenes in the first 100 pages of this book: at the cafes where Juan hangs out with the infamous Visceral Realists, and where a girl performs a sex act on him; at Maria’s house, where he breakfasts with the whole crazy family. But coffee’s presence is like the many poems that are allegedly written and never seen. “We’re poets, and we drink coffee!” Sounds like when I was 19. Whether Bolaño is glorifying literary poserdom or poking fun is for someone else to say.

5. Good Evening, Mrs And Mr America and All the Ships at Sea by Richard Bausch

The waiter came to take their orders. He stood in front of them, holding his pad and waiting - a balding, heavyset man with a tattoo of a falcon on one arm.

“Oh,” she said. “Let me see. I’ll have a cup of chilli with onions and crackers, and the pork chops, with a baked potato, and a salad. And these chicken wings. Am I going too fast?”

The waiter looked at her with drowsy eyes. “Salad - ” he said.

“And milk. And coffee. Oh, and sour cream and butter on the potato.”

What a scene! One of the best, in one of the best books I’ve read in the last year. That’s Alice Kane ordering, girlfriend of Walter Marshall. In the end, she cancels the feast and gets only an ice cream sundae, after her sweetheart Marshall orders the same, though he also gets coffee. I’m still not sure if Alice is kidding, or if this is her regular diner and assumes the waiter will know she’s kidding. But it hardly matters, the way things take off from here, and that’s the beauty of it. It shows us how much more she wants than Marshall, how eager she is, how hungry. It plants that seed in the reader’s mind. The pressures of romance on the young and idealistic. Diner-weak joe in a white ceramic mug. American dreams. These thing are eternal.

6. Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence

What will you drink – coffee?

Paul Morel speaking, a mere 360 pages into my 366-page edition, a more accurate title to which would be Mama’s Boy. 360 coffee-less pages. Early on, the Morel family is established for who they are: a brutish, drunkard father; a domineering and doting mother; inconsequential William who escapes the mother only by an early death; Annie and Arthur, siblings hardly mentioned; and Paul, a boy full of promise, brightness, vigour and talent, but bound by Oedipal cords. They are established as such, and for hundreds of pages, remain so. If ever a novel needed a double shot, it was this one. For seven years Paul “goes with” Miriam, hating her all the while. That’s a long seven years to consider marrying someone. Here coffee drinker Miriam is taking initiative, setting goals, and striving towards them, aware of her course, a destination in mind. She’s engaging with her future in the now. Despite the great murk in this story, verisimilitude reigns.

7. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

I met her in autumn nine years ago, when I was twenty and she was seventeen.

There was a small coffee shop near the university where I hung out with friends. It wasn’t much of anything, but it offered certain constants: hard rock and bad coffee.

This early paragraph is marked by Murakami’s hallmark plainness of language, and unencumbered, even detached, narration. After this short chapter, we leap ahead eight years, and it is not Murakami’s style to make sweeping statements or paint overviews. To understand what transpires in those eight years, we must compare the details ourselves. And in this instance, the difference in coffee habits are illuminating. So, for starters, we know the coffee shop “isn’t much of anything” and it serves bad coffee. Other things we learn about this coffee shop in the next page or two are that the 17-year-old borrows books, and makes certain sexual swaps with men willing to pick up her coffee and cigarette bill. Then the next section, eight years later. The protagonist is not drinking bad coffee any more. Though the hard rock on the radio may be the same, our man’s fresh-ground manual drip extracted at the right temp and allowed to bloom is certain to yield something better than the “bad coffee” of yesteryear. Are one’s coffee habits a gauge of quality of life? Certainly. Of one’s emotional state? One’s maturity, one’s level of detachment or engagement? For this reader and perhaps Murakami too, yes.

8. The Comforters by Muriel Spark

“Tell me about the voices,” he said. “I heard nothing myself. From what direction did they come?”

“Over there, beside the fireplace,” she answered.

“Would you like some tea? I think there is tea.”

“Oh, coffee. Could I have some coffee? I don’t think I’m likely to sleep.”

Isn’t it terribly English of the Baron to offer tea to Caroline, who’s just fled a religious centre (not a nunnery, not a retreat), has separated from her husband, and is now suffering delusions - hearing the clacks of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her very thoughts! Take comfort in tea. It is in character of the Baron to think so: he’s a man of affected intellectualism, calling the sections of his bookshop “Histor-ay, Biograph-ay, Theolog-ay,” and addressing everyone as “my dear”. But only coffee is up for the job. This is coffee as antidote to madness. What else to clear her head in this fix? They’ve already had Curaçao - that didn’t help. Coffee as realignment. Coffee to reconnect with your own synapses, to reset the senses and solidify reality in the forefront.

9. George Saunders’s short story The Barber’s Unhappiness from his collection Pastoralia

Mornings the barber left his stylists inside and sat outside of his ship drinking coffee and ogling every woman in sight.

This quote is the opening line to the story. I like it because the casualness of drinking a cup of coffee in the morning mixes with his other activity: woman-ogling. There’s a suggestion that one activity is casual, and so perhaps is the other. One is daily, ritualistic - so perhaps is the other. One is a gratifying sensory experience - so perhaps is the other. Or it’s meant to be anyway. After all, what about that title? What is the titular barber’s unhappiness? It’s not the coffee, I’ll tell you that. Might it be the other thing?

10. John Cheever’s short story O City of Broken Dreams from The Stories of John Cheever

The Malloys found their way, that afternoon, to the Broadway Automat. They shouted with pleasure at the magical coffee spigots and the glass doors that sprang open.

The Malloys didn’t forge a course or stride confidently; they “found their way” to their destination, as if ambling about aimlessly, dreamily. Crucially, it’s not a city of dreams, it’s a city of broken dreams. The Malloys are innocent and doomed. They are like a cluster of Red Riding Hoods setting into the forest. Cut off any section from the Cheever body of work, and you’ll see marbling of these themes. Are these mere two sentences a sufficient microcosm of Cheever’s oeuvre? An American family embarking upon enjoyment of innocent pleasures, amid the temptations of the modern world? No, not a sufficient one. But I think it’s wonderful to have people in American fiction shouting with pleasure. So often we start with the broken dreams, and from there it’s hard to get to redemptive exclamations such as Cheever’s famed closing to A Vision of the World: “Valour! Love! Virtue! Compassion! Splendour! Kindness! Wisdom! Beauty!” And any story that includes “magical coffee spigots” is a winner in my book.