Michael Palin In Nigeria – and other recent books
Thursday, 16 July 2026
In Nigeria – Michael Palin visited Nigeria with a film crew to make a three-part TV series released in early 2024, so just before I was in Nigeria. And now – two years later? – there’s a rather brief, rather badly designed (in my view) and rather disappointing book on his travels. He does get to places I was not able to visit – Port Harcourt in particular – but then he has a film crew, an armed escort and 34 bags to tote around.
Well I did have MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) looking after me although I only had a carry-on bag to worry about. And I got to a number of places in the north of the country he was not able to visit. Apart from my MSF travels I also – like Michael Palin – visited Lagos (Nigeria’s mega city). Abuja (the capital) and Kano (which would probably be the tourist capital, if Nigeria had any tourists).
Ambivalence – a review in The Financial Times on 30 May 2026 seduced me into reading Brian Dillon’s book, without I hasten to add, a great deal of understanding or appreciation. Well he points out that he could not relate to someone who did not appreciate Jacques Derrida, guru of the philosophy of deconstruction. And there’s also a hint of satisfaction – dare I say smug satisfaction – that he’d scored a mention in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner. His writing – and there’s lots of it – seems perfectly intended for Pseuds Corner.
The Brian Dillon biography from Fitzcarraldo, his publisher, reports that he ‘was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Ambivalence, Affinities, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.’
And then for something completely different I read two books by Judy Blume. With close to 100 million books sold she’s clearly an enormously popular author as a recent review on 23 April 2026 in The Economist of Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer underlined. Now I am clearly not in the Judy Blume catchment zone – girls and young women – but it’s always interesting finding out about people who you shouldn’t, according to some people, be reading and in 2025 ‘Forever … was still one of the most banned books in America’s public schools.’ So I read Forever even though a school district in Iowa worried that it described things ‘God didn’t intend to explore outside of marriage.’ Her earlier book Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – target audience, 11-year-old girls – also upset lots of people. Not only did it study the sort of things that 11-year-old girls worry about, but Margaret had a Jewish father and a Christian mother who had wisely decided she should make her own decisions about religion.
