A peek with our digital stepladder over the Times paywall to see some of what Will Self wrote about Renzo Piano’s Shard in London:

“At dinner with a table of design professionals, including Terence Conran, I found myself defending the Shard, the 1,000ft incisor of a building currently being implanted in the rotten old gums of the Thames’s banks to the immediate south of London Bridge. Not just defending the Shard but positively eulogising it, while my companions appeared suitably bemused. They – and you – might well have suspected that I’d be agin’ the thing, as an example of all that’s fatuously overblown in the modern urban environment.   More...

In the 1970s my mother did book production at Duckworth’s, the publishers in Camden Town where Beryl Bainbridge had once worked and which had published her first novels.

Colin Haycraft, the Duckworth’s supremo, was an emollient, cigar-smoking figure in a tweed jacket his wife Anna (the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis) was stylishly Gothic in dark, stretchy clothing. I did part-time work packing books at the octagonal Old Piano Factory in Gloucester Crescent where Duckworth’s had its premises.   More...

It’s a measure of how our conceptions of Eden have done an abrupt 180-degree handbrake turn that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us should have become a bestseller. This thought experiment, imagining what a post-human world might be like — and how quickly Mummy Gaia would recover from the depredations of her wayward sons and daughters — ended up being advertised on the Tube. As you descended the escalator into the frowsty netherworld, you could feast your eyes on the book’s cover image: Nelson’s Column entwined in a bushy convolvulus while the admiral’s stony gaze surveyed a tree canopy undulating towards the horizon.   More...

A review from the Times from December 2007, in its way the opposite of the Real Meals concept from the New Statesman:

There are London restaurants where having a well-known name secures you a table at short notice – and then there’s the Ivy. The Ivy plights its troth on being wedded to notoriety. It’s the kind of restaurant that, if it could, would tear itself from its foundations and heave across town to squeeze into the Big Brother house, before happily having sex on camera with the Wolseley or Scott’s. If you’re bridge-and-tunnel folk – snob Manhattan-speak for suburbanites – then you haven’t a hope in hell of reserving a table at the Ivy unless you call weeks, if not months, in advance. But if they know who you are, you can be magically seated.   More...

“I think it ill behoves recovering alcoholics – among whose number I include myself – to complain about the mores of the great drinking majority. After all, we’ve had our fill, and we’d be well advised to shut up and take our sparkling mineral water like the good men and women we’d like to become.

“But then … there’s the use of that verb – drinking – to indicate alcohol drinking without any modifier being required; it’s tough living in a society where the very act of imbibing is synonymous with intoxication, and all the harder because the available alternative drinks aren’t so much soft as sugary gloop suitable only for inducing fits in preteens (or mixing with teens’ and kidults’ vodka).”   More...