Benjamin Evans - Author

In my suitable after-the-event way, I am posting today with my thoughts on the England football team, why they brushed aside Bulgaria and (watch out tabloids) ROLLED over the Swiss, but yet when they come up against the might of Albania and the USA in major tournaments, drop out with barely a whimper. I really wasn't going to write this, but have to hear so much guff written and said about football every day, that I feel someone had to make an effort. So what reasons do we have so far to explain England failure? They don’t care about playing for their country. They don’t play as a team They don’t have the talent They don’t want to play for the manager. And so on and so on. All of these may have some element of truth, but all of them miss the key elements of the problem. Yes, when they went down against Germany they didn’t seem to care; yes, there seemed to be a reaction against the manager’s disciplinary regime; and yes, they seemed to be playing as individuals rather than a team –...

I have recently taken up the lifestyle of the professional runner. I get up each morning, run for 40 minutes, then go to work, come home, run for another hour and a half, eat, read, sleep and go to bed, over and over, seven days a week. Each time I get better at it and soon I will run a big race when I will do pretty well. Running is great like this. Everyone thinks I’m amazing. I get medals and applause. People aspire to do what I do. For five years now I have spent hours and hours of every day writing. Each I’d do a little more and each day I’d think that I’d done a little better. Then I’d go to bed, happy with myself and think I’d added to what was certain to be a masterpiece, when finished, which I’d be delighted with and which everyone would love. Then I’d finish the work, after years and years of effort. No-one would care. People would read the first chapter and then not continue. They’d be too busy, find it all a bit weird. Then I’d read it again and decide that I didn’t like it...

Byatt is a writer who considers so called universal themes - love, growing up, childbirth - in the backdrop of historical change. For her it our emotions and our choices are drawn from the influences around us - political and ideological - and her characters react as such. This seems very typical of a writer from a background in literary study - always expertly constructing around a social context, deconstructing the world through her characters and their predicaments. This has never been more obviously so than in The Children’s Book – half an ensemble family drama, half a social history of the end of the Victorian age through to the Great War. Initially we see this as a book of escapism – a family living away in the woods of the Kent countryside, beautifully depicted as a rural idyll of downs, marshes and cycling inhabitants. They are seen through the eyes of Philip, a young boy from the working classes, who is taken by this Fabian group and thrust into the frivolities of midsummer pa...

Hemingway’s first novel, set in Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, is the archetypal novel of The Lost Generation, the group of artists and authors exiled together in Europe in the aftermath of World War I. Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson. F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were its more famous residents and Hemingway their chief scribe. In it he depicts the listless parties and fiestas, drinking and loving and search for identity in an amoral world, where experience and enjoyment are the only pursuits worth having and direction and goals are forgotten in a society broken by war and death. Our main character is Jake, an ex soldier turned journalist who has been injured during the conflict, an injury that has left him impotent, a condition touched on in moments but never specifically discussed. This is a world where the physical damage of half a decade of violence is brushed under a carpet of bright lights and social whirl: ‘Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny.’ The lif...

Modern writing is still alive! Here is a book by a contemporary author that isn’t smart-arse, self-conscious or written for people who shop in Tescos. Unfortunately it happens to be set in the 17th Century Danish Court and be written by a novelist who’s pen is inspired by the worlds of rural Norfolk, but hey, at least its good, and for more real than the other genre fiction cluttering the shelves of Waterstones. The reason this is good is because it doesn’t read like a historical book. In a sense it doesn’t read of a book trapped in a time or a setting, because its characterisation is so good and its themes so universal. Ostensibly it is a love story between the lutenist of King Christian IV and the companion of Kirsten, the King’s estranged wife. However, this is by far the lease interesting part of the book, and one that you seem that Tremain has included to shape her historical and lyrical flourishes around. Romantic fiction this is not. Peter Claire is our lutenist, who takes resid...

A doctor answers a call from a local stately home, Hundreds Hall, where the young maid has been taken ill. However, on examination it appears there is nothing wrong with her, apart from an uneasy feeling about her new employment, in this house that ‘gives her the creeps’ in which she thinks she ‘will die of fright sometimes.’ Our rational doctor is sympathetic and prescribes some simple stomach mixture, but is taken in by the grand mansion in which he finds himself, and its occupants, the surly Roderick, his pragmatic sister Caroline and their rather glamorous mother Mrs Ayres. Soon he starts to treat the former for an war-injury to his leg. However, there appears to be something sinister happening to the family, particularly to Roderick, as he straggles with the upkeep of a stately home going to the dogs, at the same time beginning to have nightmarish visions at night. One by one these visions intensify and pass to each member of the family, with increasingly tragic results. Can our c...

‘Nick Clegg is a whore – and the Conservatives were the only party who would pay for a whore.’ It’s been a depressing few weeks for all those who believe in the principles of politics. From standing on opposite ends of the Television podium and apparently seeming to represent complete polarities in most of the political spectrum, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have somehow jumped into bed together to form a united front against the evil that was New Labour and Gordon Brown. They have formed a fellowship of previously warring factions, Cameron the would-be-king Aragorn and Clegg as his archer-in-chief Legolas, against the despotic Brown, who has been looking over them all with his great ego and his...evil eye. Okay, so the combination may not entirely work, but it is working to the right ends, to help all us back to fiscal harmony, where hard times will lead us one day into a new, brighter world. Or perhaps the ring has tempted all of them – Cameron a wide eyed hobbit and C...