The notion that the massive, meandering tome that is James Joyce’s Ulysses can be compressed to the Twitter format is an intriguing one. The New York branch of Penguin books has commissioned teenage Twitterers Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman to do precisely that.

The word play should be fun, but you feel that new readers will miss quite a lot of protagonist Leopold Bloom’s scatalogical contemplation in the streets of Dublin, let alone the off-the-wall stream-of-consciousness of wife Molly at the end.

And it is hard to imagine that classics by Stendhal and Shakespeare will benefit from being rendered in 20 tweets or fewer.

But as I have never - shock, horror - managed to get through the entire 14,000 lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I may just have to take a look at that. Even if Rensin and Aciman will have scarcely enough tweets for the circles of hell.

Is cooking an art form? Foodies and artists gathered to discuss just that question last night at the launch of a new book, Food for Thought, Thought for Food, edited by 87-year-old pop artist Richard Hamilton and Tate Modern director Vicenti Todoli and inspired by elBulli, the Spanish restaurant widely considered the best in the world.

As I disappear for a week off, I leave three holiday reading recommendations for anyone doing likewise.
And I make no apologies for flagging up the three books which were finalists for the Orange Award for New Writers which I helped judge.
It was a hard-fought battle with co-judges Diana Evans, the author, and Mishal Husain, of the BBC, but we all felt we presented a strong list.
Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun is a tough and gritty tale of life on the streets written with a poet’s eye for the telling praise and the winner, An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, is a beautiful story of a brilliant woman painter where the paintings seem to dance in vivid colours before your eyes.
And if I leave The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber to last it is only to give space to a little of Ann Weisgarber’s own history.
She is a white sociology teacher who lives in Texas.
She has written an utterly convincing evocation of a black family who settle in the Badlands of South Dakota in the early years of the 20th century, inspired by a photograph of a real-life black settler that alerted her to this little-known strand of American life in the Mid-West.
The politics of race in the USA is such that even after securing a British publisher, no American house took up the book – until we shortlisted it. Forgive me if I feel very proud.

It may surprise those who retain the impression that Harold Pinter was a sombre, difficult playwright, but there were a lot of laughs at tonight’s celebration of his life at the National Theatre.
The humour was obviously no surprise to those who love his work including the all-star cast – Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Jude Law, Lindsay Duncan, Sheila Hancock and Michael Sheen, and that’s just for starters -  who had given up their Sunday evening to remember the late great writer.
But the heart-stopping moment for me was when Kenneth Cranham and Jeremy Irons read some of Pinter’s love poems to his wife. “She dances in my life,” he had written of Lady Antonia Fraser.
If the readings and performances from his plays and prose were a celebration of his genius, those poems were a tribute to an astonishing love-match between the earl’s daughter and the East End political polemicist.
How she sat there in the audience and listened I cannot imagine.
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The gratitude of the nation’s museums and galleries to the Art Fund charity which helps them buy works of art was demonstrated by the turnout to say farewell to its departing director David Barrie last night.

One of the big triumphs of his 17 years in charge was the campaign that triumphed with the national museums and galleries going free.

David has used his departure to flag up the dangers of the current economic crisis, raising the spectre of charges being re-introduced.

My colleague, Simon Jenkins, is among those who think that it should be the museums themselves that make that decision - not the Labour Government whose policy free admission was.

But, with respect, that misses the point. If you speak to gallery directors like Nicholas Serota at the Tate, they make clear that free admission works precisely because it is Government policy.

Otherwise admission charges would be the easiest of recourses to balance the books, particularly when sponsorship is harder to find and wealthy donors somewhat less wealthy due to the global downturn.

Free admission has been one of the indisputable glories of the last decade and visitors have shown they love it.

It will not be maintained across the range of institutions now covered unless it is policy - and it would be weasel words from any future Government to pretend otherwise.

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