Edinburgh International Book Festival: John Crace and John Sutherland

'The Two Johnnies', as John Sutherland explained they call themselves, appear regularly as a sort of literary double act. John Sutherland is a respected academic and literary biographer, whose latest book is Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. John Crace is best known for his column The Digested Read in The Guardian, wherein he writes abbreviated parodies of well known books, or as John Sutherland put it, "he takes a cow and makes it into an Oxo cube." This was an enjoyable muddle of an event; neither writer was really interviewing the other, rather both performed and commented on the other's performance. Time passed quickly, with John Sutherland first talking about his experiences living in Edinburgh, then about Robert Louis Stevenson, and then John Crace read his parody of David Copperfield, since it's Dickens' bicentennial. Sutherland then chatted about Dickens and the perils of writing literary biographies, and Crace followed this by reading a more modern parody, of Antonia Fraser's memoir of her husband Harold Pinter, Must You Go? This produced a good deal of gentle laughter, and the audience greatly enjoyed the hour. Time passed so quickly that there was barely time for any questions at the end. Nonetheless, there were a few, and the answers were as agreeably received as the rest of the event had been. [Keir Hind]