There was talk of a literary feud when a crafty PR confronted Richard Dawkins with the work of his fellow Nibbie nominee, Peter Kay. Dawkins responded to Kay's admission that he found belief in a higher being " very comforting" with contempt. "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'? ... " he thundered. "What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not what we would 'like'." But only a couple of days later Dawkins explained the mix-up and begged leave to "apologise to Peter Kay and wish him well in the competition".
They don't make them like they used to.
Ben Jonson lamented the speed of Shakespeare's writing, wishing that instead of being feted for "never blotting out [a] line", Shakespeare "had blotted a thousand". Horace Walpole called Samuel Johnson "a babbling old woman", Alexander Pope judged the playwright Colley Cibber to have "a brain of feathers and a heart of lead", while Oscar Wilde dismissed George Meredith with the judgment that "as a writer, he has mastered everything except language; as a novelist, he can do everything except tell a story; as an artist, he is everything except articulate.''
In the 20th century Truman Capote dimissed Jack Kerouac's work, saying "that's not writing, that's typing", Martin Amis called fellow novelist Tibor Fischer "a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse". This may have had something to do with Fishcher having described Amis's novel Yellow Dog as "not-knowing-where-to-look bad".
Salman Rushdie reacted testily when John Updike took issue with the name of one of his characters, remarking that "somewhere in Las Vegas there's probably a male prostitute called 'John Updike.'". But his feud with Germaine Greer - which erupted again last year when Greer came out in support of activists trying to stop a film version of Monica Ali's Brick Lane - dates back to 1992, when an American women's magazine quoted Greer as saying "jail is a good place for writers - they write".
Now that's what I call a feud.
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