“I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair. Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction. She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there’s no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.   More...

“Now that Binyam Mohamed has returned to the UK from detention at Guantanamo Bay, there must be quite a few Whitehall mandarins — not to mention some ex-ministers — who are wandering Westminster frantically trying to clean the blood from their hands. For make no mistake: Mr Mohamed is only one among a number of British residents and citizens who claim they were tortured with the tacit support — and even connivance — of their own government.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.

“Ken Stott may be starring in A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s but it’s what he can hear in the auditorium that’s bothering him. Apparently, Stott was distracted by the sound of a mobile phone during a recent performance, so broke off to admonish the incontinently talkative playgoer thus: ‘Have you finished yet?’”

Mobile phones, Gerry Rafferty and Withnail and I’s London heritage all feature in this week’s Standard column, which you can read here.

Will Self on the ****ing London mayor, Boris Johnson.

“The tragic death of baby Jadon Smith after being attacked by family pets should be taken to heart by all dog owners. While it’s also tempting to demonise certain breeds — such as the Staffordshire bull terrier, one of which was involved in this killing — we need to acknowledge that the most lethal canine is actually a weird inter-species chimera: the aggressive dog and his irresponsible owner.”

To read the rest of Will’s Evening Standard column from February 11, click here.

“Monday was Boris’s proverbial ‘good day to bury bad news’, for while he reassured Londoners of what a splendid job Transport for London had done responding to the Siberian conditions, a far more important mayoral statement was being slipped out. This was Boris’s decision to delay the third phase of the low emissions zone, due to come into force in October 2010.”

You can read the rest of Will’s latest Standard column here.

Will has confessed that kebabs are virtually all he eats:

“I’ve no idea if my being espaliered in this fashion on an almost daily basis is what’s responsible for my trim form and excellent health – but it must all add into the mix. I dare say that when I die and go to hell, I’ll appreciate the irony as Satan threads me on to his pitchfork and stokes up the brimstone. I wonder if I’ll have the sangfroid to cry out: ‘Hold the hot sauce! And the coleslaw!’”

‘Back in the early 1980s, Alan Bleasdale’s TV drama Boys From the Black Stuff gripped the nation. It followed the fortunes of a group of unemployed men. One of them, Yosser Hughes, went around Liverpool saying “Gissa job” to anyone he came across who was working, following it up with the more plaintive, “I could do that.”‘

To read the rest of Will’s Standard column, go here.

“Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman, describes the latest raft of measures aimed at freeing up the supply of credit as being like ‘giving the kiss of life to a corpse’. He’s right: the British banking system is floating face down in a pool of its own illiquidity and it’s pointless us chucking it another lifeline. The problem with the Government’s bail-out last October is that while it may have stopped the patient flat-lining, it left him on taxpayers’ life support, in a persistent vegetative state.”

Read the rest of Will’s Standard column here.

I have to say I feel a certain pity for US President-elect Barack Obama — here he is, on the verge of being the most powerful man in the world, yet he’ll be unable to spark up a relaxing cigarette in his own home, for smoking is banned in the White House. In recent weeks, Obama has been dodging questions about his smoking but he’s admitted that, while having officially quit, he’s “fallen off the wagon” several times. On the campaign trail he was often seen chewing gum and it’s a reasonable assumption that this was of the nicotine variety — a substitute for the love that dare not puff its name.   More...