Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
10 Mar 2013 04:01:30
Kate Atkinson's new novel is a marvel, a great big confidence trick – but one that invites the reader to take part in the deception. In fact, it is impossible to ignore it. Every time you attempt to lose yourself in the story of Ursula Todd, a child born in affluent and comparatively happy circumstances on 11 February 1910, it simply stops. If this sounds like the quick route to a short book, don't worry: the narrative starts again – and again and again – but each time it takes a different cours... Read Full Story
Turned Out Nice Again by Richard Mabey
10 Mar 2013 04:00:15
Will we ever be able to defeat the weather? Richard Mabey, our greatest nature writer, thinks not. When he hears of possible technological fixes for climate change – the idea that giant parasols could be sent into space to shield us from the sun, or that the ocean be sown with iron to promote the growth of plankton which would then soak up the atmospheric carbon dioxide – he sees only hubris, which is exactly what got us into the current crisis in the first place. But in any case, anxieties abou... Read Full Story
The Silence of Animals by John Gray
06 Mar 2013 15:17:06
Of the rest, the substance of the pages that follow, he appears to have some sympathy with his detractors, who have, he claims, variously accused him of "incest, homosexual tendencies, heterosexual debauchery, incompetence, deceit, murder, sissiness, 'carbuncular' practices, drinking too much, taking drugs and smelling bad… "
The strange thing about that particular winning pitch is the fact that the often brilliant pieces in his book often have exactly the quality of taboo-breaking private corr... Read Full Story
Do you know "Who Owns the Future" ? The writer Jaron Lanier knows!
06 Mar 2013 15:14:25
The people who lose out are the creators. The author starts his list with the translation services: "with each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment". Much of the non-payment culture is voluntary, based in the ethos of the US west coast. "It is a commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profo... Read Full Story
Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane by Stewart Home
06 Mar 2013 15:11:20
I had an odd moment early on in this book when I thought – hang on, the notorious avant-garde novelist cum situationist provocateur Stewart Home, author of Down & Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton and 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, has written A campus novel? Not that it would take long to work out who the author was if the book were handed to you with the cover torn off. His narrator and anti-hero, Charles Templeton, lectures in cultural studies at the City University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ... Read Full Story
The Silence of Animals by John Gray
05 Mar 2013 11:34:05
Gray later brings that primal scene up to date. Starving Neapolitans in 1944 hunt and consume alley cats, or feed on tropical fish scavenged from the city aquarium; Soviet prisoners interned by the Nazis gobble the corpses of other inmates like ravening hounds. This is what happens when the pretences of civilisation and humanism fall away – for in Gray's view they were never more than a conceit given sanctimonious support by religion. In Eden, God flattered man by electing him to lordship over t... Read Full Story
My Brother's Book by Maurice Sendak
05 Mar 2013 11:32:52
Over a career spanning seven decades, Maurice Sendak illustrated more than 90 books, but when he died last May at the age of 83, tributes were dominated by one: Where the Wild Things Are, which turns 50 this year. The thousands of perfect pen strokes on each of its pages are a far cry from My Brother's Book, Sendak's last complete book and a rare one aimed at adults. It retains the vivid watercolour palette that characterises most of his work, but deploys it in a much looser, more sketchy style,... Read Full Story
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
05 Mar 2013 11:30:44
The question of who invented the digital computer is almost as futile, in a way, as asking who built Chartres Cathedral. The answer, in both cases, is "many people". But in the case of the computer, it's at least possible to finger a few of the major suspects. The prime one, of course, is the Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing, who came up with the idea of an abstract machine that turned out to be the theoretical underpinning of all computing devices. But whereas in Britain Turing's insights we... Read Full Story
A Treacherous Likeness by Lynn Shepherd
04 Mar 2013 03:28:11
Shepherd is not the first novelist to weave fantasy around the Shelleys: that distinction was claimed in 1837 by the youthful Benjamin Disraeli in Venetia. Nor is she the first commentator to have become fascinated by Mary Shelley's indomitable daughter-in-law, Jane. A Treacherous Likeness opens with Jane Shelley summoning detective Charles Maddox to the house on Chester Street from where she controls access to Shelley's archive with an iron grasp. Charles's brief is to establish what papers Cla... Read Full Story
Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy
04 Mar 2013 03:26:29
The Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged from the revolution of 1979 has lasted quite well. Thirty years on, and better late than never, Iran is a more prosperous country than under the Pahlavi monarchy overthrown in that turbulent year. Bled by a long and inconclusive war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988, revolutionary Iran has kept aloof from the chaos on its borders, where three states (the Soviet Union, Ba'athist Iraq and Afghanistan) have disintegrated. Since the rise in 2005 of the price o... Read Full Story
Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms
04 Mar 2013 03:22:37
Perhaps this is down to the incremental, drily pragmatic nature of democratic politics; perhaps it's just reflective of capitalism being capitalism, so that anything hostile to its interests is quickly neutralised. Whichever it is, while inequality is widening, glaciers are still melting and what passes for British debate about it seems laughable. On a bad day, it can seem as if the entirety of politics now rotates around a quarterly event: the release of the provisional figure for economic grow... Read Full Story
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
01 Mar 2013 16:54:23
If it does, then American author Edith Pearlman has had to wait an embarrassingly long time for vindication. At 76, she has spent four decades publishing short stories – at least 250 of them – in regional or academic periodicals. Prizes such as the O Henry and the Pushcart increasingly went her way: last year she won four trophies and was shortlisted for three for Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories.
This volume of 34 stories from across her career has popularised the view that an Americ... Read Full Story
