Philip Hensher

Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Philip Hensher was among Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. The author of six novels, a collection of short stories and an opera libretto, he has won numerous prizes including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Stonewall Journalist of the Year. A regular presence in the British media, alongside his Wednesday column for The Independent, he writes for The Spectator and Mail on Sunday. His latest novel, The Northern Clemency, is published by Fourth Estate.

Philip Hensher: Showing Syria our fragile side is our strength

It is right to try a variety of rapprochements between us and the Middle East, and to the political we might add cultural approaches. You never know; that might do the trick where hard diplomacy is always going to fail.

Recently by Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher: Was Mason a racist, or just an imbecile?

Monday, 17 November 2008

Wittgenstein would have been greatly interested by the case of the BBC Bristol presenter and the taxi cab. Anyone looking at it will find it difficult to classify some of the statements made in the course of the events as meaningful in any sense.

Philip Hensher: Scent and the secret of daily hedonism

Monday, 10 November 2008

Daily aesthetic delights are all around us, if only we have the energy to take pleasure in observing them. It is as easy for food to be a pleasure as not, and a fresh apple can offer more enjoyment than many a pretentious £40 supper. If you stop to observe the typeface, say, that this, or anything else you read today is printed in, you will see that somebody once designed it. They took immense care to make the different letters of the alphabet harmonise with each other, and to give some pleasure to the eye. It is all a matter of paying attention.

Philip Hensher: Grisly appeal of student life in Perugia

Monday, 3 November 2008

It was never going to be a piece of information which found its way on to a university prospectus for intending students. After boasting about the size of the library, distinguished alumni, and notable awards, it would be surprising, to say the least, if a prospectus reminded the reader that, "Last year, one of our undergraduates was raped and murdered in the course of a drug-fuelled sex game". One might have thought it the sort of thing that the University of Perugia for Foreigners would rather keep quiet.

Philip Hensher: How can we get Jamie et al to read?

Monday, 27 October 2008

A curious moment came last week as Jamie Oliver brought his latest evangelical cooking crusade to an end. After months in Rotherham, bewailing the poor cooking skills and nutrition of the natives, he started talking to a mother about the possibility of taking up a place at catering college. She was doubtful; her intelligence, clearly, was not very high, and her reading skills very poor. Oliver reassured her; after all, he said, he himself had never read a book in his life.

Philip Hensher: Forget about writing if you're on the Booker

Monday, 20 October 2008

After the whole business was over and I had my life back, I sat down and tried to work out what the dreamlike experience of being short-listed for the Booker Prize had been like. I had published six novels, to varying degrees of public exposure, and didn't think anything much could surprise me. Having been a judge of the Booker itself, as well as having lived in the literary world for years, I thought I could cope with it. It felt, however, in the end, like an experience quite different from anything else, and the day after, when the laborious considerations of juries had passed over my book, like nothing so much as a release.

Philip Hensher: Thank God for the Bible Society

Monday, 13 October 2008

We can certainly admire the zeal which will preserve a language

Philip Hensher: Take a tip from Heston, Jamie

Monday, 6 October 2008

Two new events appear to display our very peculiar relationship with food. Jamie Oliver's campaigning food programme went to Rotherham to address the under-class's lack of basic food knowledge and skills, turning up mothers who fed their toddlers nothing but kebabs off a van and illiterates somehow surviving on 10 packets of crisps a day.

Philip Hensher: You didn't do anything wrong, Miriam

Thursday, 2 October 2008

Miriam Margolyes, that wonderful actor, had a sad story to tell to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs last week. Forty years ago, in her early twenties, she told her mother that she was a lesbian. "I spoke to her about an affair with a woman and three days later she had this stroke. I realised it was a mistake on my behalf. It was an indulgence of me to tell her that."

Philip Hensher: Alitalia flies into the sunset, and not before time

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

Alitalia, the hilarious national airline of Italy, is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. The Italian government has been trying to find a buyer for the airline for two years now, without any success. Now it looks almost certain to go under. Following the collapse of Swissair, and the Belgian Sabena, Alitalia's situation makes one wonder why on earth any nation state wanted to own an airline in the first place. It just doesn't seem like a very good idea at all.

Philip Hensher: There's only one way to find out what art is 'worth' – and Damien Hirst knows it

Monday, 8 September 2008

Three years ago, Londoners noticed that a sort of Victorian space shuttle seemed to have crashed into one of its most famous streets. They telephoned their friends, and their friends telephoned their friends. Shortly afterwards, a giant puppet of a small girl emerged, soon to be joined by a colossal puppet of an elephant.

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