French Women Don't Get Facelifts: Aging with Attitude: Ageing with Attitude by Mireille Guiliano
28 Jan 2014 00:38:58
Having lived far too long in North America, Guiliano has lost all sense of irony. She actually means what she says; it's scary, or simply tedious. In a rather irritating franglais volapük, she delivers her pearls of wisdom, brushing on all topics from "the magic of grooming" to "living to 100?!", peppering her views with recipes such as "emulsion of oysters on a fondue of spinach". Didn't you know that "oysters help with dark circles"? And don't forget "alternate nostril breathing" – it will app... Read Full Story
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
28 Jan 2014 00:38:04
It's been more than 20 years since novelist Tom Clancy's super-spook Jack Ryan first made it into the movies, and over a decade since he last appeared on screen. Over the course of five films, he's been variously played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford (twice), Ben Affleck, and now Chris Pine, recently seen piloting the Starship Enterprise through JJ Abrams's teen-friendly galaxy. It was assumed that Pine would bring viewers too young to remember The Hunt for Red October or Patriot Games into the ... Read Full Story
First World War by Frank Furedi
28 Jan 2014 00:35:40
The centenary of the first world war, "the war to end all wars", with its terrible tally of 16 million dead and 20 million wounded, and its contentious origins and outcomes, has recently seen renewed wrestling in the comfortable trenches of the commentariat. A motley crew that includes Michael Gove, the education secretary; Tristram Hunt, historian and Gove's shadow; comedian David Mitchell; Jeremy Paxman and refugees from Blackadder have been exercising their opinions about the causes and meani... Read Full Story
Sedition by Katharine Grant
27 Jan 2014 01:24:12
London, 1794. The coffee houses are abuzz with men discussing business and politics – news of the revolution in France rolls across the Channel like low-lying fog, infecting the city's radicals. Four wealthy City speculators know their daughters' impressive dowries can win them noble husbands, the girls just need a little polish first. A plan is hatched; they will band together, buy a pianoforte (the harpsichord is so passé) and engage a tutor to give the girls lessons in preparation for a cattl... Read Full Story
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
27 Jan 2014 01:22:02
Though many of these stories are overtly moving, the book's most distinctive pleasure is its portrayal of the psychoanalytic process. "I'd noticed that Lily's voice went up at the end of sentences," Grosz writes. Experiencing this as a pressure to respond to her, Grosz suggests to Lily that she may be trying to gauge whether he agrees; perhaps his laughing at her jokes implies the same need. Lily concedes this, and, as she does so, makes the kind of unconscious association that drives psychoanal... Read Full Story
Ping Pong Diplomacy: Ivor Montagu and the Astonishing Story Behind the Game That Changed the World by Nicholas Griffin
27 Jan 2014 01:20:30
The occasion was the historic visit of the US ping-pong team to Beijing in response to an ostensibly impromptu invitation from their Chinese counterparts, issued at the World Table Tennis Championship in Japan after Cowan, an American player, boarded the Chinese team bus. It is credited with breaking the ice between China and the US after a 22-year freeze and paving the way for Henry Kissinger's secret trip and President Nixon's 1972 visit. China rejoined the world after decades of isolation.
T... Read Full Story
White Beech: The Rainforest Years by Germaine Greer
23 Jan 2014 02:51:41
Germaine Greer is known for her outspoken, often combative views on gender politics and Australian identity. White Beech, a passionate account of her recent project to reclaim part of the continent's ancient rainforest, puts a new slant on her engagement with issues of self-individuation and belonging that is all the more compelling for being universal. When Greer first stumbled across it in 2001, the forest in question consisted of "60 hectares of steep rocky country, most of it impenetrable sc... Read Full Story
The Almost Nearly Perfect People by Michael Booth
23 Jan 2014 02:49:26
In Michael Booth's informative, if strenuously humorous, book on Scandinavia, the Finns emerge as the booziest of all the Nordic peoples. During the 1939-40 winter war against Soviet Russia, they steeled themselves against the cold by drinking large quantities of vodka, schnapps and other high-proof spirits. Sobriety has rarely been the Nordic way, and in parts of Scandinavia heavy drinking is a sign of masculinity. Prohibition laws were introduced in Finland in 1919, but these had little effect... Read Full Story
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
23 Jan 2014 02:47:17
One disappointment of John Lanchester's otherwise highly engaging Capital was the rather half-hearted whodunnit that knits together the inhabitants of the London road upon which the novel is set. A more ambitious (and more risky) approach would have done away with the demands of traditional narrative structure, allowing the geography of the road to dictate the plot of the novel much as Georges Perec used the architecture of a Parisian apartment block to shape his masterpiece, Life: A User's Manu... Read Full Story
On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee
21 Jan 2014 02:35:35
When New Yorker critic James Wood called Chang-rae Lee's Pulitzer-shortlisted novel, The Surrendered, ambitious, well written and "alas, utterly conventional" in 2010, Lee posted on Facebook that he found the review "maddening and irritating". But his new book is his most experimental: written in the first-person plural, set in the future, with a heroine who's somewhat fictional, even within Lee's fictional world. This petite, "superbly formed" young woman, Fan, works in the fish farms of B-Mor:... Read Full Story
Shelley Jackson and her new interesting way to write books
21 Jan 2014 02:33:51
After inscribing a story word by word on to the skin of 2,000 volunteers in 2003, the author and illustrator Shelley Jackson has embarked on a fiction project that is already much less solid: writing a story in snow.
"'To approach snow too closely is to forget what it is,' said the girl who cried snowflakes," begins Jackson's as-yet-unfinished tale.
Painstakingly drawn into scraps of snow around her Brooklyn home, the story imagines a fantastical taxonomy of snowflakes, evoking snows made of "... Read Full Story
David Almond can explain how to write books
21 Jan 2014 02:32:00
We are natural storytellers. We've been doing it since we lived in caves. We do it automatically when we tell tales to children. We shape our memories into coherent narratives. We gossip and tell jokes and dream. We live in a world of stories brought to us in books, plays and film.
But when we try to write, so much gets in the way: doubts about our own creativity; abstract notions about what constitutes good writing; anxieties about our ability to come up with good ideas. The words themselves t... Read Full Story
