In 2018, we’re 45 years away from first contact with the Vulcans, and 217 years away from the start of NCC-1701’s historic five-year deep space mission. But in this moment, not only has Star Trek avoided cultural obsolescence, it’s as relevant as ever. What does that mean for the next five, even 10 years? Should fans already be worried about recent history repeating itself?
Welcome to the shopless shop, where customers pay for decisions to be taken out of their hands. Since 2014 the number of visitors to subscription shopping websites has grown by 800%. Customers receive a “curated box” of items of beauty products, clothes for work, even toys for their pets. The companies’ success (in the US they’re booming) lies in the surprise. Today, if you know what you want, you can buy it on your phone in a single click. If, instead, you simply want… something, the subscription box promises a personalised experience from the gift-ish unwrapping to the possibility that the contents inside will change your life. Could this be the future of shopping?
William Trevor is one major writer about whose life I know only odd scraps; yet this feels appropriate. I know that he was of southern Irish Protestant stock; that his real name was Trevor Cox; that he worked in the same advertising agency as the poet Peter Porter; that he took holidays on Porquerolles, a Mediterranean island with no vehicular traffic; and that he shared the Irish short story writer’s traditional fate of being called “an Irish Chekhov”. But I can’t think of any public statement he made, or any cause he publicly adhered to, or any time when the non-literary pages of newspapers were interested in him. Was he knighted? Did they make a South Bank Show about him? I met him once, in 1999, after he won the David Cohen prize, but was left with only a strong impression of courtliness, charm and reserve.
Atlas may have written only two biographies but he has thought long and hard about the pitfalls of the genre: he likens himself to “a car mechanic, repair manual in hand, peering under the hood of a steaming engine”. His book motors smoothly along: it is well written, wide-ranging, packed with gossip and has some of the best footnotes you’ll ever come across. But it’s hard to miss the suffering underneath – the story of a life made sadder by the writing of a Life.