Nick Hornby, the pop nerd among bestselling authors, knows that his heroes Prince and Charles Dickens have nothing in common – and that’s why he tried to compare them.
Any conspiracy theorist will also tell you without being asked that since Adam, Eve and the serpent everything is connected to everything else, so why not Charles Dickens with Prince? Nevertheless, the truth and nothing but the truth must be in the first paragraph: the writer and the musician have practically nothing to do with each other. “Dickens never heard any of Prince’s recordings, and there is nothing to suggest Prince ever read anything by Dickens.” Nothing connects them, except maybe that they both died at 58, or rather, as Nick Hornby “on closer inspection” turns out, Prince was already dead at 57. “So I don’t even have that.”