The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel
21 Jan 2013 20:02:33
In Britain, the second world war was prosecuted with rhetorical majesty by one of the great writers of the century, Winston Churchill. After the crisis of May 1940, the prime minister became a demanding impresario to a circle of literary men with corkscrew minds and an appetite for jeopardy, from Ian Fleming to Stephen Spender. "We were a generation," Graham Greene later wrote in Ways of Escape, "brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the first world war, ... Read Full Story
A lot of rhetorical question in the book "Back from the Dead by Peter Leonard "
15 Jan 2013 13:27:23
What would you do if your dad was Elmore Leonard? Write imagist poetry, political intrigues, short stories about country curates or stifled suburban wives and their minimalist marriages? The one thing I'll bet you wouldn't do is set yourself up as a purveyor of lowlife, urban thrillers. Pa's always going to have the drop on you. But here comes Back from the Dead, Peter Leonard's fifth thriller – and just as lowlife and urban as its predecessors. Just as teeth-clenchingly, chest-clutchingly, unre... Read Full Story
TS Eliot's letters became very popular: The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 4, 1928-1929
15 Jan 2013 13:22:35
n this fourth volume of collected letters, the limitations of the project show up clearly. TS Eliot's correspondence documents his life but rarely expresses it. He reliably transcribes some aspect of what he thinks, but the form doesn't spark new thoughts in him as it does in other writers – not necessarily companionable ones – such as Beckett, Larkin or Joyce. By this stage of his life, temperamental resistance was intensified by professional circumstance. Eliot was a director of a publishing h... Read Full Story
New book for new year: Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra
15 Jan 2013 13:20:19
Ways of Going Home, Zambra's third novel, is both a literary and meta-literary foray into Chile's troubled past by a writer who lived during the Pinochet regime but who doesn't consider himself one of its primary victims. "The novel belongs to our parents," he says, understanding that his childhood experience of terrorism was vicarious, diluted by his infancy. His generation are "war correspondents, tourists" or – and here the metafiction kicks in – "secondary characters" in this retold narrativ... Read Full Story
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
11 Jan 2013 18:49:41
Each of these phases of human development was correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations. Fire, ceramics and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture and the invention of metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied civilisation. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same stages, in the same sequence. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which... Read Full Story
Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain by Christopher Moran
11 Jan 2013 18:47:14
It was Richard Crossman who in 1971 called secrecy the "real English disease". "Real" because at that time the English disease was generally supposed to be strikes. Government secrecy – which this book is about – blanketed vast areas of British public life for most of the last century, upheld by a fierce and undiscriminating Official Secrets Act, passed through parliament by underhand means in 1911 (the government of the day pretended it was just to stop German spies), and by the gentlemanly cod... Read Full Story
The Letters of TS Eliot: Volume 4, 1928-1929
11 Jan 2013 18:42:17
In this fourth volume of collected letters, the limitations of the project show up clearly. TS Eliot's correspondence documents his life but rarely expresses it. He reliably transcribes some aspect of what he thinks, but the form doesn't spark new thoughts in him as it does in other writers – not necessarily companionable ones – such as Beckett, Larkin or Joyce. By this stage of his life, temperamental resistance was intensified by professional circumstance. Eliot was a director of a publishing... Read Full Story
Why We Build by Rowan Moore
09 Jan 2013 13:16:17
Why are architects so mercurial? Why is architect-speak so impenetrable? Rowan Moore, the Observer's architecture critic, answers question one and could not be accused of accusation number two. One of the UK's most accomplished writers on the profession, he critiques the most important buildings and the people who masterminded them with a style that is both entertaining and cuts through the crap. Why We Build, his new book, does not disappoint. It does not set out to be a definitive study, more ... Read Full Story
Navel Gazing Anne H Putnam
09 Jan 2013 13:11:57
Show me a woman who has never worried that she is too fat and I will show you a man. Or a woman who has been raised by extremely self-aware parents who didn't go on the F-plan diet in the 1980s. (Sorry, Mum!) Female fatness has been an issue since long before Susie Orbach wrote about it 35 years ago and it continues to be one in a world where over half of us (both men and women) will go on new-year diets. Now, of course, it's all about equality of self-loathing, and men are just as likely to dev... Read Full Story
Susan Spencer -is a story about women win
09 Jan 2013 12:51:03
Susan Spencer-Wendel was given possibly the worst news imaginable: she had an incurable medical condition that would probably give her only another year or so to live.
But instead of surrendering to despair, the 45-year-old journalist embarked on a mission to wring every ounce of joy and pleasure out of her remaining months.
Her account of that journey is likely to become a bestseller in America this year. Until I Say Goodbye: My Year of Living with Joy is to be published in March. The eagerly... Read Full Story
Raised from the Ground by José Saramago
29 Dec 2012 21:30:58
The temptation I can only partly resist in this review is to let Saramago write it. This is how he opened his Nobel lecture in 1998: "The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife. My mother's parents lived on this scarcity, on the small breeding of... Read Full Story
La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso, translated by Alastair McEwen
29 Dec 2012 21:28:17
Roberto Calasso takes his cue from Sainte-Beuve: "M Baudelaire has found a way to construct, at the extremities of a strip of land held to be uninhabitable and beyond the confines of known Romanticism, a bizarre pavilion, a folly, highly decorated, highly tormented, but graceful and mysterious, where people read the books of Edgar Allan Poe, where they recite exquisite sonnets, intoxicate themselves with hashish to ponder about it afterwards, where they take opium and thousands of other abominab... Read Full Story
