Column by David in The Times.

I’m on holiday (although not, as ever, from this column; it must be something to do with writing fortnightly, every other week off being deemed quite enough holiday from the world of literary journalism already, thank you very much – thus the words is away shall remain forever unprinted at the bottom of this page). I brought with me what I felt was a fine cross-section of high to middlebrow reading: Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire (the first David Kepesh novel, the second of which, The Dying Animal, has just been made into the movie Elegy); Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; Imran Ahmad’s memoir of growing up Pakistani in London in the 1970s, Unimagined; and Rachel Cusk’s In The Fold. I was entirely content with this selection, convinced it would satisfy all my reading chops, until I realised that my partner was bringing Christopher Ciccone’s Life With My Sister Madonna.

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Column by David in The Times.

LAST WEEK I was at the first night of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Hamlet – yes all right, the David Tennant one, although since there are actually a number of other actors involved in this play, it’s a tad unfair that that’s how it should have come to be known. It was very entertaining, if not quite the Hamlet Year Zero that some sections of the British media might have you believe – for that you’d still have to meet Tennant’s other most familiar part and travel back with him to 1599 at the Globe.

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Column by David in Esquire.

A friend of mine was having a facial, at a perfectly respectable salon, when the facialist offered him a blow job.

Our text for today, some words from Speaking For Myself, the autobiography of Cherie Blair. Mrs Blair – arguably the least Esquire person in the world – tells us, in lieu of her discussions with Hillary Clinton about Bill’s tendency to internally examine his interns, that, “The idea that men just can’t help behaving like that is nonsense. It’s a myth… that men are inflamed by the slightest glimpse of an available body. I don’t believe it for a second. Uncontrollable sexual urges are nothing of the sort. Of course men can control them, just as women can.”