Update

I'm looking forward to reading Tom Sharpe's The Long Pursuit and The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

In the meantime I'm working my way through Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. I was expecting a work of literary criticism (of formal poetry) but in fact is a manual of prosody. Since I'm still writing that sonnet, I'm picking up a few tips. 'Trochaic substitution', 'pyrrhic substitution', 'the hendecasyllabic pentameter' etc. I've seen them in poems, but didn't know their name. More importantly, I didn't know when to use them. The ear, of course, is the real judge, but often your ear tells you it's wrong and you don't know how to make it right.

* * * *

I heard John Humphreys talking to the Chief Rabbi Jonathan the other day, in the latest of that series of his. In the preliminary discussion, he asked what it was all about. Humphreys replied, 'You have half an hour to convert me to Judaism.'

'Why should I want to do that? Don't you have enough problems already?'

Jack Benny, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen - and now, Jonathan Sacks.