Witch Hunt by Syd Moore
17 Oct 2012 01:47:58
Moore's debut The Drowning Pool took inspiration from the legend of a 19th-century witch to shape an alternative history of the Essex girl and a disquieting reworking of the ghost story. Witch Hunt opens with journalist Sadie Asquith landing a contract to write a book on Matthew Hopkins – the Witchfinder General, who cut a bloody swath through East Anglia during the English civil war. Reeling from the untimely death of her mother, Sadie determines to assuage her grief through work, pushing aside... Read Full Story
Science on Stage by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr
17 Oct 2012 01:44:48
"Putting on a play is a sort of scientific experiment", says Michael Blakemore, director of Michael Frayn's brilliant though somewhat controversial play about physics and physicists, Copenhagen. In this well-researched and illuminating study, Shepherd-Barr explores how the theatre has provided a forum for exploring science. Beginning with Marlowe's "ur-science play" Doctor Faustus she quickly moves on to more "quintessentially postmodern" pieces such as Caryl Churchill's play about genetics, A N... Read Full Story
New format of fiction
08 Oct 2012 21:36:46
One of the joys of English is that, while its huge vocabulary can be deployed in mesmerising Joycean arpeggios – for example, in Will Self's extraordinary new novel, Umbrella – it can just as easily concentrate its meaning in a few well chosen words.
There is, indeed, a dialectic in the canon, between the wordy (Shakespeare; Byron; Dickens; Joyce) and the lean (King James Bible; Dickinson; Beckett; Hemingway).
A new celebration of brevity reaches its climax this week in Matt Shoard's online ma... Read Full Story
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
08 Oct 2012 21:35:15
Now he tells a long-hidden story that sheds light on racism and the damage it does. And, although this time his research was conducted chiefly in rural France, it had its share of thrills. Reiss persuaded a French small-town official to blow open a municipal library's safe when the librarian – the only person knowing the combination – suddenly died.
The Black Count is a study of a hitherto obscure historical figure, General Alexandre (Alex) Dumas – not the famous Alexandre Dumas père, author of... Read Full Story
The Cutting Season by Attica Locke
08 Oct 2012 21:33:42
For a minute, the glamorous cliché wiped away the discomfiture that had plagued me all day. The opening of Attica Locke's second novel does precisely the opposite. She begins with an unsettling moment of fear and drama that tells us very clearly we're not in Tara any more. There is, literally, a snake in the garden of Eden.
The Cutting Season is set in the fictitious Belle Vie plantation, where the magnificent antebellum mansion sits uneasily cheek by jowl with the restored slave quarters. Like... Read Full Story
Last Man Standing by Jack Straw
07 Oct 2012 02:57:19
When Barbara Castle appointed the young Jack Straw as her special adviser at the social services department in 1974, she said she wanted him for his "guile and low cunning". She was not, presumably, disappointed. Straw went on to be a Labour frontbencher – in either the cabinet or shadow cabinet – for 23 consecutive years. In all that time, he resisted categorisation into any of the party's many strands of opinion and faction. After becoming an MP in 1979, he joined the leftwing Tribune Group an... Read Full Story
Alive by Piers Paul Read
07 Oct 2012 02:54:20
It is unsurprising that some of the 16 Uruguayan rugby players who survived the infamous 1972 plane crash in the Andes would later develop a motivational speaking sideline. The trials that the young men endured – freezing temperatures, terrible injuries and most notoriously, a lack of food that forced them to eat the bodies of their dead friends – are so extreme that just reading about them should ensure you never complain about anything again – unless it involves necrophagy. Yet Read's powerful... Read Full Story
MI6 by Gordon Corera
07 Oct 2012 02:52:49
Corera, a BBC security correspondent, delights in the drama of espionage, but is troubled by its "moral hazards". The stories of senior controller Daphne Park, the spy Greville Wynne, the Soviet informer Oleg Penkovsky, the double agent Kim Philby and the Soviet bloc controller Harold Shergold are told with evident relish, but MI6's post-cold war, post-9/11 activities tarnish its reputation. The then head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove got too close to Tony Blair, Corera argues, and it was thanks t... Read Full Story
The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax
03 Oct 2012 16:07:03
Anyone suspicious that the publishing industry may be run by a small group of corporate-minded killjoys will applaud the DIY-ethic of Shevlin, who has published this quirky comic novel himself. The perpetually astonished hero finds himself in a conspiracy involving murder and the theft of cabinet-level documents, having done no more than give directions to a large man wearing a balaclava on the Holloway Road (mental note: men in balaclavas are either thugs or terrorists, unless they have very po... Read Full Story
Eric Hobsbawm was died
03 Oct 2012 16:05:10
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, led tributes to the Marxist historian and academic Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday , calling him "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family".
Hobsbawm, one of the leading historians of the 20th century and an intellectual giant of the left, died in the early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free hospital in north London, his family said, following a long illness. He was 95.
Miliband said Hobsbawm had "b... Read Full Story
What do you know about MacArthur?
03 Oct 2012 16:04:00
Junot Díaz's debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won him a Pulitzer; his short story collections brought him international acclaim. Now the 43-year-old's "spare, unsentimental prose" and "raw, vernacular dialogue" have landed him a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" grant.
Twenty-three new MacArthur fellows were named by the MacArthur Foundation yesterday. They will each receive a no-strings-attached grant of $500,000 over the next five years – widely known as a "genius" grant – to allo... Read Full Story
The Confidant by Hélène Grémillon
02 Oct 2012 02:32:50
It's difficult to imagine a more intensely French novel than this. In 1975 Camille finds a long letter among the notes of condolence sent following her mother's death. The letter doesn't seem to be intended for her but, as more letters follow, the story that pieces itself together could scarcely matter more to her. In the telling of this story, which begins just before France is engulfed by the second world war, the novel employs narrative devices of ancient pedigree: epistolary confessions, suc... Read Full Story
