A Course in English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges
31 May 2013 14:27:50
Professor Borges, then, is a translation of a transcription of a series of apparently extemporised lectures, and this, unfortunately, is how it reads. "Now, in the same way that we have seen the way Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that in the same way that Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, so we see Boswell in relation to Dr Johnson." The sentence is representative of the book's verbal profligacy. Granted, when you do finally figure out what is being sai... Read Full Story
The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J Sandel
30 May 2013 02:33:34
Some things, such as love and money, don't need defending from the market because you can never buy the real McCoy, only surrogates or introductions that might lead you to them. Sandel is more worried about the things that can be traded without being completely destroyed, but at the price of becoming somehow degraded or tarnished. What was lost, for example, when Newcastle United's historic St James' Park stadium was renamed after its sponsor? What is the effect on human dignity and equality whe... Read Full Story
Burnt Island by Alice Thompson
30 May 2013 02:31:24
Life on the island progresses as though written by Max as part of his new book. It is full, at least, of sex and terror. Women on the island seem to be both sexually attractive and available: the island's GP not only goes on a date with him, but – eternal fantasy of the writer – has read all his books. His time there is also riddled with the motifs that a cynical author such as Max might put into a work of horror fiction: doppelgangers, mute children, bird attacks. How reliable are his perceptio... Read Full Story
tapestry by Phillip Terry
30 May 2013 02:27:40
Ah, I see what's in store for us: pastiche Anglo-Saxon. This could, I worried, get tiresome; and I wondered whether using terms like "five-toes" for "feet" and "five-fingers" for "hands" throughout, when I have a very strong hunch that both Anglo-Saxon and Norman had perfectly serviceable words for "feet" and "hands", might not get irritating after a while.
It doesn't. By showing a language in flux, tapestry draws you into its world: that of the creation of the Bayeux tapestry (which, as we are... Read Full Story
Feral by George Monbiot
24 May 2013 14:10:15
When the foundations of Trafalgar Square were dug in the 1830s, builders exposed river gravels crammed with the bones of hippopotami, straight-tusked elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs and lions. Also compacted into this archaeological nougat were the fossilised faeces of spotted hyenas. Other sites in London have yielded the remains of woolly mammoth (the Strand), reindeer (South Kensington tube station), woolly rhinoceros (Battersea power station) and giant ox (Knightsbridge). Some of these ... Read Full Story
Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong
24 May 2013 14:08:10
You have to start with Moneyball. The Book of Genesis for analytics in sport; the tome which lifted the darkness on the face of the deep. Michael Lewis's book, published in 2003, was a sports-business biography that became a movement. It is now shorthand for the use of detailed statistics in sport, particularly around recruitment – these days, a great many elite sport teams accept that fracking raw data produces insights the human eye, no matter how experienced, will miss. Each year the MIT Sloa... Read Full Story
NOS-4R2 by Joe Hill
24 May 2013 14:05:20
Victoria McQueen, a teenager living in New England, rides her bike across a strange bridge into another reality and finds herself trapped in Christmasland, the demented stronghold of the vampiric Charlie Manx. Manx, sustained by the force emanating from his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith (guess the licence plate), is a child-killer with a psychotic sidekick, Bing Partridge. After a desperate struggle – one of the novel's best set-pieces – Vic emerges as the only survivor of Manx's predations. Manx wind... Read Full Story
The Hope Factory by Lavanya Sankaran
23 May 2013 12:06:21
Anand and Kamala are both dreaming big. He's the hardworking boss of a car factory in Bangalore with his eye on a lucrative Japanese deal; she's his domestic servant, who wants her bright 12-year-old son to get the kind of education that will haul the family out of poverty. They are each caught between the city's ambitious energy and its layers of bureaucracy: things will be better soon, as long as relatives stop meddling, and rent stops increasing, and kickbacks are no longer required to get an... Read Full Story
The Hive by Gill Hornby
23 May 2013 12:04:44
The story takes us through one year in the life of an Anglican primary school, deep in the most bourgeois Boden country. First day back, the new headmaster explains that government cuts have kyboshed his plans for a new library, and so the elite St Ambrose Fundraising Committee is born. The calendar commences with a Lunch Ladder: "one person has a lunch, charges £15 a head, and those who attend have a lunch in turn and so on". It's followed by the Lakeside Summer Ball, which happens in December.... Read Full Story
The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, introduced and edited by Harry Mount
23 May 2013 12:03:50
Like so many lucky "ladies", I feel quite an intimate connection with Boris Johnson. For the last few years, I have received birthday cards, Mother's Day cards and Christmas cards with declarations of love from him. This is my youngest daughter's joke. It started when she was about nine: "You gotta love a bit of Boris," she says. And many women have. So his cartoonish persona works even on little girls, though as we all know, clowns are really scary. What is scary about Boris is that he is serio... Read Full Story
The Society of Timid Souls by Polly Morland
22 May 2013 15:13:28
Morland skips lightly where angels fear to tread. Her book has astonishing range. There is an especially wonderful encounter with Rafaelillo, a Murcian matador (involving a masterclass with a fake bull); an austere audience with David Alderson, uncannily brave bomb disposal expert; and a cheery chat with 50-something Sally Ann Sutton, mauled by a mad rottweiler in her determination to save a baby from his jaws. But this is only the tiniest sample of Morland's interviewees. In every case, she pro... Read Full Story
A litle bit about book As I Lay Dying James Franco
22 May 2013 15:12:10
Critics of James Franco are getting worn down, if not yet fully convinced, by his sheer energy and productivity. The actor, writer, director and artist has now come to Cannes with a bold and high-minded new project: a screen version of William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, which Franco directs from his own screenplay, and co-stars as Darl Bundren, the glowering son in a dirt-poor family in rural Mississippi. Tim Blake Nelson is the haggard, toothless father Anse, and Beth Grant plays the... Read Full Story
