Gallery: Syrian poet Adonis introduces the images he makes using calligraphy and colour which he calls 'rakaim'

A fascinating tribute to modern German reasonableness

A characteristic element in the long, sorry story of Anglo-German encounters is the assertion that, finally, past stereotypes have been put behind us and we (the British) have moved on from the crass, backward-looking gurning of the past in favour of a mature embrace of the Federal Republic. But no sooner is this claim made than some bit of shamefulness materialises. With my own head still full of interesting ideas from Philip Oltermann's new book ? a paean to modern German reasonableness ? I was foolish enough to see War Horse at the cinema. Here was a film which, despite twisting and turning to be even-handed, simply could not help itself and, like some faux-reformed alcoholic, gorged itself on an entire miniature liqueur selection of Anglo-German clichés.

Almost a century after the terrible events initiated in 1914, here are the British as class-bound, gruffly proud, good with animals, and only really happy in beautiful rural scenery. At one point you could almost hear a cinema-wide gasp of satisfaction as that standby, the short-tempered yet golden-hearted army sergeant, was taken down from a high shelf and unwrapped once more. Meanwhile, the Germans in War Horse try so hard to be modern Europeans and yet, hands trembling, end up gunning down horses, executing teenage brothers and scaring a poorly French girl who just wants to make jam in a windmill with her grandpa. The movie makes all the Germans rat-like, pallid, with funny hair and festooned in sinister weapons. Yet what chance do they have against a row of bewhiskered British character actors and a rather odd horse?

Oltermann's charming mix of memoir, analysis and random facts has to struggle to stay upright in the sort of storm generated by such an elemental piece of Anglo-Hollywood lore. But it is he who is on the side of right. Everything that makes modern Germany so appealing ? a sort of wryness mixed with tentative enthusiasm, a wish to be liked tempered by a genuine concern to engage with a terrible past ? are all in this book.

Oltermann, when in his mid-teens, arrived in Britain from Hamburg with his parents and ended up staying. Keeping Up with the Germans switches between justifications for this decision, portraits of other Germans who have tried it too (Heine, Adorno, Schwitters), and analyses of some key Anglo-German encounters, particularly in sport and car design.

It is a risky way of creating a book as it relies on a high page-by-page level of interest rather than any real structure or overarching argument, but Oltermann manages it beautifully. There is a particularly good section on old-fashioned variety shows in Blackpool and the huge impact that one sketch ? long-forgotten in Britain ? has had on TV comedy in Germany.

He describes the sequence of events that made this happen in a way which is touching, curious and funny, then neatly clicks it into his own experience, and leaves the reader with a fine sense of the sheer oddness of the modern world. Indeed, the whole book can be compared to a series of expert variety turns, with the reader watching act after act and not really noticing or caring what is linking it all together. A long, excellent analysis of the Baader-Meinhof Gang is almost over before the reader realises that the only real Anglo-German element in the chapter is that Astrid Proll, hiding in London, once went to a concert by the Clash where the band were wearing Baader-Meinhof T-shirts. But this is late in the book and the whole tone is so winning that it seems sour even to point out the section's irrelevance.

Oltermann mulls over a number of often quite obvious Anglo-German subjects ? differences in humour, factory skills, philosophy ? and threads through them his own experiences growing up here. So he talks about Theodor Adorno's time at Oxford, focusing on the philosopher's obsession with Merton College notepaper, and links this to Adorno's cultic role in postwar Germany. He contrasts this with the parallel career of AJ Ayer and then his own much less towering interest in philosophy at school.

At times, Keeping Up with the Germans is frustrating in that he lets so much rich material go. On these occasions he scratches the surface, when his readers would be more than happy if he gouged it. What he says is fascinating ? there is a perfect discussion of Bildung (self-cultivation) ? but there could be a lot more and Oltermann blows his cover when describing how the word "pretentious" is hardly used in German and he needed to look it up. Clearly he has anglicised himself too much and, panicking that his curiosity about Adorno is making him pretentious, throws in laddish references to the Verve and Blur, derides an Adorno essay on jazz and then bales out completely.

After a while this Invasion of the Body Snatchers aspect of British culture becomes oppressive and the book can be read as a case history of how a decent, earnest and thoughtful citizen of Hamburg has had his personality altered by his host country. This is most striking in the chapter on football. Oltermann establishes at the beginning of the book that he managed to have no interest in sport while living in Germany. But then, having moved to England in 1996, he gets mired ? even giving himself a false memory by feigning excitement about old Anglo-German soccer games. These he can only have watched as grainy videos, but he raves on about Keegan and Toshack and gives a detailed commentary on a 1977 Liverpool-Mönchengladbach game.

This entirely retrospective interest in Kevin Keegan's hair, height and playing style suggests that something terrible happens when foreigners settle here. Oltermann could have written interestingly about what had happened in his life that made it rational to watch an old Liverpool-Mönchengladbach game, but instead it seems to have become an unthinking part of his adoptive British brain patterns.

Yet Keeping Up with the Germans is filled with very enjoyable things ? from a German newspaper called Hermann and printed in London to considerations of such lovely German terms as Elfmeter, Jamaika-Koalition and Siegesscham (you will need to read the book to find out what they mean), to Herder's Germanising of "Schäkespear" and a hilarious transliteration of Marlene Dietrich singing in English ? and it should be read by anyone touched by its subject.

The traditional Anglo-German discussions of the Mini v the Beetle or Kevin Keegan v Berti Vogts plus a good word for Currywurst do suddenly, however, seem a bit antique in the light of David Cameron's recent "No" to a tighter European Union. As Cameron said that small word, London and Berlin were, for the first time in almost anybody's memory, circling protagonists with serious, different priorities, rather than the two neutered trading partners we have come to know and love. There is no reason why intelligent compromise cannot fix this crisis, but it is not unreasonable to say that the Anglo-German relationship could once again be the crux of Europe's future. As War Horse so carelessly and Keeping Up with the Germans more thoughtfully show, the two countries seem condemned, like two not very interesting immortals, to tumble, grappling with one another forever through infinite space.

? Simon Winder is the author of Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern.

Originally written for his grandson, 1936 tale issued in limited edition of 200 copies amid controversy over copyright

A children's story by James Joyce has been published for the first time ever by a small press in Ireland.

Joyce's The Cats of Copenhagen is a "younger twin sister" to his published children's story The Cat and the Devil, which told of how the devil built a bridge over a French river in one night, said Ithys Press. Publisher Anastasia Herbert called it a "little gem" which she said "reflects Joyce's lighter side, his sense of humour ? which can fairly be called odd or even somewhat absurdist".

Like its predecessor, The Cats of Copenhagen was written in a letter to Joyce's grandchild, Stephen James Joyce, while the author was in Denmark and the four-year-old Stephen was in France. The new tale is "exquisite, surprising, and with a keen, almost anarchic subtext", said Ithys, which has printed a limited run of 200 illustrated copies, ranging in price from ?300 (£250) to ?1,200.

"In early August 1936, Joyce had sent his grandson 'a little cat filled with sweets' ? a kind of Trojan cat to outwit the grown-ups. A few weeks later, while in Copenhagen and probably after hunting for another fine gift, Joyce penned 'Cats', which begins: 'Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen.' Surely there were cats in Copenhagen! But perhaps not secretly delicious ones. And so the story proceeds to describe a Copenhagen in which things are not what they seem," said Herbert. "For an adult reader (and no doubt for a very clever child) 'Cats' reads as an anti-establishment text, critical of fat-cats and some authority figures, and it champions the exercise of common sense, individuality and free will."

The letter in which the story was found, dated 5 September 1936, was donated by Hans Jahnke, son of Giorgio Joyce's second wife, Asta, to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. The Foundation has called its publication an "outrage", stressing that it has not granted permission for the book's release.

"We have been completely overlooked and ignored. It's only common decency to ask the owner," said the Foundation's Fritz Senn. "We are outraged. We have had no hand in this unfair thing and feel not just ignored but cheated."

Although the published works of Joyce entered the public domain in Europe on 1 January this year, Senn says it has not yet been determined whether the non-published material is now out of copyright as well. "Copyright has been lifted only, we believe, from the published material. All the huge amount of non-published material we believe is still under copyright, so this is, we believe, an infringement of that," he said, adding that he is concerned the "very belligerent" Joyce estate might sue. "We haven't heard from them [but] what I'm afraid of is that with the large amount of copyright taken away from them, their remaining territory will be defended even more fiercely."

But Anastasia Herbert of Ithys Press believes the unpublished works of Joyce are now in the public domain. "A publication such as that of The Cats of Copenhagen is legal and valid and any attempt to interfere with its free dissemination is both unlawful and morally reprehensible," she wrote in a statement, in which she went on to say that the "attempt by Mr Fritz Senn of the Zurich Joyce Centre proprietarily to assert some right on this now public-domain document is preposterous".

"The book was conceived not as a commercial venture but as a carefully crafted tribute to a rather different Joyce, the family man and grandfather who was a fine storyteller, much like his own father John Stanislaus," wrote Herbert. Those with a spare ?300 will be able to find out.

Romance Writers Ink's 'More than Magic' contest accepts vampires and werewolves but not gay and lesbian tales

Love is patient and kind ? and strictly between a man and a woman, at least according to an Oklahoma-based romantic writing competition, which decided to ban same-sex entries and prompted a furious backlash from romantic fiction authors.

Romance Writers Ink, the Tulsa, Oklahoma chapter of the Romance Writers of America, runs the "More than Magic" writing competition. The contest accepts entries covering romance about vampires and werewolves, romance set in the future and the past, erotica and urban fantasy ? but decided this year that it would "no longer accept same-sex entries in any category".

Romantic fiction novelist Kari Gregg says she got in touch with the contest to ask why, and was told that "RWI chapter members were uncomfortable with accepting same-sex contest entries. 'Same-sex was just too much.'"

The news was met with an incensed reaction from authors, who suggested boycotting the contest altogether, wrote to RWI to complain and spread the word across the internet. Gregg told the Guardian that she was "staggered" by RWI's "nonchalance". "The arrogant presumption that their behaviour was OK infuriated me as a professional, who (reasonably) expected her work to be considered with the same courtesy and respect afforded to every other romance book, but also as a parent of a LGBT young adult," she said. "Both the professional and the parent responded with an immediate, 'how dare they?'"

"Romance is a genre that is not only about love, but also one that explores people finding an identity and their place within the community," agreed the author Courtney Milan. "To bar same-sex romances from recognition implies that same-sex couples do not deserve to have the same exploration of identity and community belonging that heterosexual couples enjoy. That is a very dangerous and discriminatory message to send."

The Tulsa organisation has now cancelled the competition, saying in a statement on its website that "we have heard and understood the issues raised, and will take those concerns into consideration should the chapter elect to hold contests in the future".

"Please note: our contest coordinator, Jackie, is a chapter member who graciously volunteered to collect entries and sort by category. It is unfortunate that she has become the object of personal ridicule and abuse," added RWI. "We recognise the decision to disallow same-sex entries is highly charged. We also opted not to accept YA entries. We do not condone discrimination against individuals of any sort."

Author Heidi Cullinan, president of Rainbow Romance Writers, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender chapter of the Romance Writers of America, was reluctant to claim cancellation of the contest as a victory. "I suppose it is in a way, but mostly the whole thing makes me sad," said Cullinan. "It's clear the chapter felt threatened and still doesn't fully understand that they were discriminating. The excuse of the moment seems to be that 'same-sex romance is a genre'. No, we aren't. I'll buy that we're a group, a demographic perhaps, but no more than 'Southern women romances' should be a genre or 'non-Caucasians' should be a genre. Same-sex romances cover every genre you can imagine and every one recognized by RWA ? even inspirationals."

The actor, writer and Dickens expert will be joining us on Friday 10 February between 1pm and 2pm for a live Q&A. Post your questions now

On Friday 10 February, at 1pm (GMT), Simon Callow is going to join us for a webchat, in what promises to be one of the highlights of this month's celebratory coverage of Charles Dickens's bicentenary here on the Reading group.

Simon Callow ? of course ? is one of the UK's finest and best-loved actors, a star of stage and screen, as well as being a respected author. Of particular concern to us this week, however is his long stage and screen relationship with Charles Dickens. Not only has he frequently appeared in adaptations of books like A Christmas Carol (playing Scrooge) and David Copperfield (a delightful Mr Micawber), but he has also often played the author himself. He most recently donned the beard and greatcoat in the 2011 Doctor Who season finale, and elsewhere he has appeared as Dickens in a one-man stage show The Mystery Of Charles Dickens (written by Peter Ackroyd), in the film Hans Christian Anderson: My Life as a Fairytale and the BBC's programme An Audience With Charles Dickens. According to Callow, "playing Dickens and peforming his work has been like standing in front of a blazing fire".

That last quote, by the way, comes from Callow's excellent new book Charles Dickens And The Great Theatre Of The World. Here, Callow builds on the work already done in Charles Dickens: A Victorian Celebration (a successful earlier book about Dickens and Christmas) by providing a zippy and informative biography of his hero, focusing particularly on Dickens's lifelong obsession with perfomance and the stage. As you might expect, Callow is able to bring considerable personal insight to that subject and this webchat provides an excellent opportunity to find out more.

Simon will be joining us live on Friday lunchtime, but please post your questions in the thread below now.

Share with us your photos of beautiful bookshops

Yesterday, Sarah Crown invited readers to add to Flavorwire's excellent list of beautiful bookshops. The response has been fantastic and bookshoppers from across the world have been telling about the most attractive bookshops they know and posting photos of them for others to gaze upon in wonder.

Blog reader wondernick nominated the Old Pier Bookshop on Morecambe promenade: "[it's] a spectacular jumble of books spread across 4-5 interconnected rooms. There doesn't appear to be much by the way of ogranisation so you kind of have to look at everything."
Wondernick also included a link to a blog where a few photos of the shop have been posted. If you do flick through them, look out for the stuffed goose.

"Leakey's bookshop in Inverness" was added to the list by ElizaS. From the photograph, I'd say Leakey's qualifies as a beautiful bookshop.

DanHolloway, a regular on the book blog, put forward his favourite bookshop, Albion Beatnik in Oxford: "It's home to several dozen collectives, zines, and writers' groups and is pretty much the only place I know where you can walk in off the street pretty much any time (it rarely closes before midnight)."

earweego nominated the children's bookshop Junibacken in Stockholm and iamirv told us about Gould's Book Arcade in Newtown, Sydney: "[it] is pretty incredible for sheer amounts of books in one place." iamirv wrote. I'm not sure about this one, though. It looks like this:Gould's Book Arcade. Granted there are a lot of books on the shelves, but I'm not sure I'd award it a beauty prize. Well, based on this photo anyway.

Please keep posting your nominations below Sarah's blog, and if you would like to share with us your photos of a beautiful bookshops, we have created a Flickr group entitled Beautiful bookshops, where you can do just that.

From Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, the novelist picks out the writers who portray true friendship as an antagonistic business

Lars Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two books on Blanchot (Blanchot's Communism and Blanchot's Vigilance: Phenomenology, Literature, Ethics) and his blog Spurious. He has also written two novels, Spurious and, published by Melville House, Dogma.

Buy Dogma at the Guardian bookshop

"'In your friend you should possess your best enemy', Nietzsche writes. What a remarkable thing to say! This is a concept of friendship radically different from the smugly narcissistic friendship collectives of Facebook. Nietzsche's true friend is someone who challenges you deeply, who badgers, bothers, enrages, and insults you ? an antagonist who is not content to leave you be. In the last few years, a bit of slang that describes this relationship has wormed its way into the Oxford English Dictionary: a frenemy.

"My novels, Spurious, Dogma, and the forthcoming Exodus, relate the adventures of two such frenemies, maverick philosophy lecturers W and Lars, who travel through Britain and overseas, bantering and bitching as they go. Of the two characters, it is W who is more obviously cruel, claiming that Lars is lazy, morbidly obese, and has a low IQ, as well as terrible sartorial sense. But Lars, it has been suggested, shows a special cruelty of his own, his frenmity apparent in the deadpan way he narrates the novels, allowing the wildly idealistic, failure-loving W to hoist himself by his own petard. For my part, I find their fren-ship a refreshing alterative to the bland support networks of 'kidults' locked in positive feedback loops of mutual reassurance. True friendships should contain an element of the cruel and cutting. The oddly refreshing antagonism of frenemies is something I look for in life, and in the literature I read."

1. Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

Tall, thin Don Quixote is full of deluded imaginings, believing himself to be a knight-errant riding out to restore the bygone values of the age of chivalry. His comic foil Sancho Panza is short, fat, and ignorant, who, although aware of Quixote's delusions, lets himself be caught up in his companion's pursuit of honour and glory, albeit because he thinks he might get some personal gain from their adventures. Theirs is a sunny kind of frenmity, with Sancho as the comic sidekick, an everyman realist to his master's idealist, spouting what have come to be called sanchismos, a humorous mixture of ironic Spanish proverbs and put-downs.

2. Samuel Beckett's Vladmir and Estragon

Waiting for Godot or, Frenemies: A Love Story. Two bowler-hatted old men wait by a leafless tree, much as they waited the day before, and as they will doubtless wait the next day, too. In Beckett's play, there's all the time in the world to occupy ? time for old jokes and pratfalls, for bickering and recriminations, for nostalgia and wistfulness; anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay". Vladimir, the more philosophical of the two, tends to muse on abstract matters; Estragon, the more mundane, is more concerned with the whereabouts of his next meal. But they are united in the push and pull of their frenmity, as their waiting threatens to erode all hope.

3. Thomas Bernhard's Glenn Gould and Wertheimer

In The Loser, Bernhard presents his fictionalised Glenn Gould as the very embodiment of the great artist, which makes life very difficult, and, in the end, impossible, for Wertheimer, a fellow piano student at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Wertheimer gives up his studies for good when he overhears Gould's terrifyingly great rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations. But it is when Gould casually labels his friend a "loser" that Wertheimer is sent into a vortex of self-loathing, and, eventually, suicide.

4. DH Lawrence's Gerald Crich and Rupert Birking

Lawrence's Women in Love is also a novel about men in love, and, indeed, in love with one another. Rupert Birkin, the central male character, has an evangelical sense that he must reckon with "the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men". His nude wrestling match with Gerald Crich, so memorably staged by Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Ken Russell's film, is a homoerotic tableau of the frenemy, with both men struggling at once for and against one another.

5. JG Ballard's James Ballard and Robert Vaughan

In Crash, when James Ballard is hospitalised after a car accident, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of a sinister former scientist, Robert Vaughan, who is obsessed with re-staging the car crashes of celebrities. Vaughan frightens Ballard even as he fascinates him, and their increasingly uneasy friendship tips over into something macabre. When Vaughan takes his last death drive, Ballard writes his hagiography, paying an ambivalent tribute to this Lucifer of the motorway.

6. Thomas Mann's Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta

Set in a sanatorium in Davos, in the decade leading up to the first world war, The Magic Mountain features a microcosm of the pre-war European intelligentsia, including the frenemies Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, the former embodying the positive, hopeful ideal of the Enlightenment, and the latter, the more chaotic, order-threatening aspects of fascism, anarchism and communism. The two men debate furiously, and end up fighting an improbable duel, foreshadowing the coming clash of ideologies that would tear the continent apart.

7. Gene Wolfe's Badlanders and Dr Talos

Gene Wolfe's epic science fiction series The Book of the New Sun has its share of mysteries. One of them is the strange friendship between Baldanders, the permanently exhausted giant who won't stop growing, and the wily, diminutive Dr Talos who beats, bullies and cajoles his larger companion. Initially, the seemingly slow-witted giant appears to be Talos's charge, but things turn out to be the other way around: Baldanders is actually a scientist allied with sinister alien forces, who built his frenemy Talos for obscurely masochistic purposes of his own.

8. Patricia Highsmith's Bruno and Guy

Patricia Highsmith is a master of the perverse friendship, and her first novel Strangers on a Train was no exception. Hitchcock's film version portrays Bruno as merrily murderous and Guy as morally upstanding, but the novel presents the two men intertwined in a twisted friendship that is more significant than any other in their lives. Guy may be disgusted by the drunken, vicious Bruno, but when Bruno falls overboard at sea, Guy instantly dives into the waves, unable to imagine life alone without his cruel friend.

9. Saul Bellow's Charles Citrine and Von Humboldt Fleisher

In Humboldt's Gift, Charles Citrine makes a fortune from writing a successful Broadway play, based on the life of his older friend, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher. Big mistake! Although his manic depression, alcoholism and pill-popping mean that he's never delivered on his early talent, Humboldt still upholds the loftiest ambitions for art ? ambitions, which, he claims, Citrine has utterly betrayed. Citrine's success means that the easy friendship this pair enjoyed has gone, with Humboldt wounding his now frenemy with accusations of sell-out and crass commercialism.

10. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Stoppard famously sets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the interstices of Hamlet, elevating two supporting characters from Shakespeare's play into leads. His focus is on how the pair occupy themselves when they are offstage in the parent play, which appears to be by aimless banter and mock-philosophical arguments. But there's an existential twist: Stoppard's characters seem to be aware that they are unimportant fictional characters, each casting aspersions on the other's comparative degree of reality, each claiming that the other doesn't really exist. Such acts of frenmity grant them what little sense of reality they have in a world which seems, to them, to be absurd and out-of-control.

Whether their material has been exhausted, or they have, very few writers reach old age at the top of their game

When I was doing my DPhil on Conrad, one of the seminal texts, (now, I suspect, largely unregarded) was Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. I was innocently struck by his thesis that Conrad, after an apprentice period that covered the first couple of years of his writing life, then had a golden period (from 1897?1911) in which he produced a series of masterpieces, after which two indifferent books followed (Chance and Victory) and then a distinct falling off into the later works. This seemed to me, at the time, admirably observed and illustrated, and it did not occur to me for a moment how banal the argument actually was.

Maybe I hadn't yet read enough yet? Achievement and Decline? That's what novelists do, and the trajectory of Conrad's career ? for Moser was largely if unremarkably right ? can serve as a model for the career arc of most novelists. Think of Conrad's contemporaries. DH Lawrence? Perfect. Virginia Woolf? Yup. Thomas Hardy? Sure enough. EM Forster? Saw the problem coming and headed it off at the pass.

Or think of ours. Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift ? that excellent generation of novelists whose best work is now, pretty clearly, behind them. And, yes, I know who won last year's Man Booker, and was glad of it. But it's not Flaubert's Parrot is it?

There is nothing very remarkable about any of this. It figures: you have to learn your trade (novels one and two?) then, while energy is still fresh and the supply of material still vibrantly available, there should follow the best and freshest work, which may well be sustained over a longish period. But energy flags, talent ? however scintillating ? may fade, and the wellsprings of personal feeling and reminiscence dry up. These changes are often marginal, and the "decline" of later works for most novelists is a matter of degree. Conrad's The Rover is still quintessential Conrad, only less so. And I am still thoroughly engaged by many writers who are my contemporaries, even in their so-called decline, rather than by the new generation. Better Philip Roth's Nemesis than Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.

I suspect that, for most writers, there is only a limited amount of available material that is sufficiently ignitable ? like underground organic fuel ? to provide the heat for high quality fiction. If you scan the careers of most novelists, you can pretty much trace the genesis of the early and middle works, work out how the root systems draw on laid-down life material. And there comes a point with most of them when, this period over and the material thoroughly mined, you can sense a kind of scrabbling about for an adequate subject. Once you have to think too hard about what your next novel is going to be about, there may be trouble coming: "well, I'm working on an idea for a novel ?"

But what are we to make of the cases where this over-simplified model simply doesn't pertain? For the "late flowering" of Henry James (those three great novels were written at 60-ish, which isn't all that late) or the remarkable trajectory of the career of Roth, winner of the 2011 Man Booker International prize for fiction? Why can a few writers keep up the standard, even increase the quality and depth of their work, while most fade gently into that mere professional competence that simultaneously masks and reveals their decline?

Why, come to think of it, is such decline less common in artists than it is with writers? David Hockney's vibrant new show of landscapes at the Royal Academy is, in the view of many critics, his best work. A few have added some "terrific for an old codger" guff, but most have been silent about Hockney's age (he is 74) not out of respect, but because it's irrelevant: many painters in their 70s have produced great work.

Composers too. The examples are obvious, though I want to add two nice contemporary instances: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Both have recently produced brilliant work which is both strikingly fresh and new, and a perfect distillation of what has gone before; which both resists the dying of the light and takes it as its subject.

Why is it less common for novelists to maintain such quality into relative old age? The answer ? this seems to be happening to me a lot these days ? is that I just don't know. But when it does happen it is worth remarking. Responding to Roth's wonderful run of novels written when he was in his 60s and early 70s, Saul Bellow could only shake his head: "It's just astonishing that he brings these books out one after the other, so serious and so well-developed in their construction. I wish I understood it. I'm very impressed." Bemusement and admiration. Perfect.

But this is, one has to acknowledge, the exception. The rule is: Decline. Well, that's life, isn't it? It happens to top class athletes, of course, but also to top class brains: mathematicians, chess players, physicists. Why shouldn't it happen to novelists? Most of us, thinking about the topic, would acknowledge the inevitability of decline with some equanimity. We experience it ourselves. But if you are a novelist it must be galling to acknowledge the fading of the light.

A nice example occurred at the Hay festival in Mexico, when Martin Amis, musing on the career arc characteristic of novelists ? and no doubt thinking about himself as well ? observed:

"We're all going to die twice. We're going to die as everyone dies, but before that our talent is going to die. There are no exceptions to this. It's an entirely 20th century phenomenon ? Shakespeare died at 52, Dickens at 58, Jane Austen at 41 and DH Lawrence at 44. But now you have the octogenarian novelist, and on the whole they're no bloody good ? You can't keep it up and there are various ways you can see novelists disintegrating before your eyes as they move past 70."

The general truth of this has been pretty universally acknowledged, though some novelists have tried to exempt themselves from the process. "Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better," Edmund White said staunchly on the release of his new novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, which I haven't read, though I hope its content is better than its title. Most reviewers were respectful, though nobody initiated a Hallelujah Chorus in praise of White's capacity, at the age of 72, to overcome the effects of creative degeneration.

No surprise in that: hardly any writer can.

Quiz: It's 60 years since Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne. Have you paid due respect to Her Maj's appearances in literature?

Ahead of Valentine's Day, how not to win someone's heart with a book dedication

Before we go wading into the annual Hallmark slush-fest that is Valentine's Day, I thought I'd offer some stark relief by making the theme for this week's Book Dedications HATE!. So, here's some bespoke bile found in a 1953 edition of Jim Corbett's Jungle Law. Here's hoping it's ironic, but we've blanked out the full name just in case ?