Column by David in The Times.

ONE OF MY FIRST columns for this newspaper, some God knows how many years ago, was about how I don’t like Saul Bellow. How, in fact, I’d never managed to get through a whole book by the 1975 Nobel prizewinning laureate, idol of Amis and Hitchens and Wood and many other big important men of letters. Well, (after many imprecations by friends and readers telling me how wrong I am) I have now. I’ve hauled my way to the end of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s extended rant against the Sodom and Gomorrah that, by 1970, the 1960s had created of America. Much of it – the interminable Socratic philosophical dialogues, the endless streams of sketchily introduced characters, the constant self-pity of the obviously Bellow-like bookish hero – was like swimming through glue. One bit that was not, however – one bit which I read avidly, devouringly, for the page and a half it goes on – is when the black pickpocket on the bus that Sammler rides every day corners the old Holocaust survivor in the lobby of his building and shows him his penis.

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Column by David in The Times.

LAST WEEK OUR DAUGHTER, just coming to the end of primary year 2, received her school report. I’m not going to brag about it, but hey: despite being a man who doesn’t much like to use the expected adjective, in this case I can’t think of a more appropriate one than “glowing”. As my partner and I sat there reading this report and quietly kvelling (it’s Yiddish – Google it), both of us, however, noticed something missing, and it wasn’t just our understanding of what P.S.H.E/Citizenship is. What we wanted to see was our daughter’s placing in class. You know, that old, terrifying, all-important fraction that used to be on the top of school reports when we were kids: 1/32, or 32/32.

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Column by David in The Times.

THERE IS A MOMENT in The Edge of Love, the new British film – I was going to say about Dylan Thomas, but I’ll hang fire on that for a moment – when the bohemian Welsh bard explains why he needs to sleep with so many women. “It’s because,” he says, “I’m a poet, and a poet feeds off life!” I’ve seen this line quoted twice now in reviews to illustrate the awfulness of The Edge of Love’s script, but in fact it’s an unfair example: the delivery of it by Matthew Rhys, the actor playing Thomas, signals quite clearly that the poet is being ironic, aware of the cliché.

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Column by David in Esquire.

Some men want to be whipped by Nazi-uniformed prostitutes. There’s no point in trying to suppress it.

At the time of writing, I’m in Italy and Silvio Berlusconi is on the telly. A woman in the audience rises to her feet and – my Italian English-speaking friends tell me – says that she has recently lost her job; that, given the state of the Italian economy, she is worried about her career prospects, and about her financial security in the future, and what does he have to say about it? And Berlusconi smiles, the light from his artificially whitened teeth just one of the many glints reflecting off his Vaseline-smeared, glossy-hair-pegframed face, and replies: “Don’t worry; I’m sure a woman as beautiful as you can easily find a rich man to settle down with.”