A WRITE BURKE

Martin Chilton shares his October reading highlights including a blunt, but warm, memoir by actor Kathy Burke

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The Anthony Bourdain Reader (Bloomsbury) includes “An Exquisite Corpse”, the last, mordant, previously unpublished piece that the television star, bestselling author and acclaimed chef wrote before taking his own life in 2018, when he was 61.

This collection features his fiction, essays, graphic novel articles and travel writing. Unsurprisingly, the book contains copious wild antics from a man who says that he spent 28 years “serving dead animals and sneering at vegetarians”.

His admirers will love the book and although there are plenty of entertaining moments, I wearied (after nearly 500 pages) of the repetitiveness of the shtick that underpins tales of a drug-addled past. I preferred his highly original reflections on life in restaurant kitchens. For instance, his quirky short essay “The Purpose of the Hamburger Bun” is spot on: the brioche roll is overrated - and bog-standard ketchup is better than artisan condiment sauce.

Mark Forsyth’s Rhyme & Reason: A Short History of Poetry and People (for People who Don’t Usually Read Poetry) demonstrates yet again that the patriarchy has long tentacles. First World War soldier poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke have been fêted for more than a century, yet I was surprised to read in Forsyth’s book (Allen & Unwin) that of the roughly 2,000 poets published in Britain in the years 1914-1918, “there were more women than soldiers” and that “their poetry was what soldiers were reading in the trenches”. As Forsyth remarks, “they’ve almost all been edited out of history”.

Finally, my first Christmas present recommendation of the year is for Michael Hogan’s smashing debut novel,