Strange Rebels written by Christian Caryl
26 Jul 2013 01:20:08
Foucault observed that the hundreds of thousands who took part in the vast, angry processions that choked the streets of the Iranian capital in the weeks that followed were chanting not only "Death to the shah", but also "Islam, Islam, Khomeini, we will follow you" and "Khomeini for king". For the time being, though, their king over the water, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, remained in exile, holed up in a suburb of Paris from where he plotted Pahlavi's downfall. He would eventually return to Iran... Read Full Story
About Easy Money (aka Snabba Cash), from a novel written by Jens Lapidus
24 Jul 2013 03:23:54
Historically Scandinavia has been shaped by its harsh climate, an innate stoicism, the stern Lutheran branch of Protestantism and two centuries of immigration. The area was among the first to embrace the cinema early in the 20th century and, most especially through Carl Dreyer in Denmark and Victor Sjöström and Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, it has established a tradition of austere moral exploration that is thought to express national character. Lately, however, through the movies, TV and popular li... Read Full Story
The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen
24 Jul 2013 03:19:13
The Professor of Poetry is contiguous again – in fact, McCleen tells us, both her first books were cut from the same "unworkable" original novel. This seems to have been an autobiographical text: both McCleen and Judith spend their childhoods in a strike-torn Welsh mining village, while both McCleen and Elizabeth Stone, the central figure of The Professor of Poetry, attend Oxford University. Both books share a distinctive gothic, bookish vision. Oxford here is a lovely toy, garlanded in heighten... Read Full Story
Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead
24 Jul 2013 03:17:37
The engaging narrative is elegantly arranged to encompass lives of increasing disarray. Winn has packed his bags with "geometric precision" to travel from Connecticut to the family holiday home in the remote New England island of Waskeke, where his pregnant daughter Daphne is to marry. But Winn manages to fold away his feelings with far less precision, taking with him emotional baggage of which he is comically unaware, and becoming entangled in a messy flirtation with one of the young, beautiful... Read Full Story
Anyone Who Had a Heart by Burt Bacharach
22 Jul 2013 01:24:19
If only Burt Bacharach's life could be told exclusively through his compositions. It would be a soft-focus tale of tender heartache and innocent romance. But the songs were just Bacharach's trade, the lucrative business that won him Oscars, Grammys, the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and a devoted generation of damp-eyed fans, including Cherie Blair and Laura Bush (the pair once serenaded him backstage in Dallas: "I thought that was wonderful").
The problem with Bacharach's... Read Full Story
2121 Susan Greenfield
22 Jul 2013 01:22:21
Following successful careers as a researcher and a populariser, Greenfield has evolved into a figure of great controversy – and sometimes mockery – for persistent vocalisation of her technofears, and simultaneous failure to supply evidence to support her pronouncements, or engage in debate about them. Primarily she has expressed concern about a supposed addiction to various forms of computing. In an emblematic Daily Mail article in 2009 she asked us to imagine "a world without long-term relation... Read Full Story
1913 Florian Illies
22 Jul 2013 01:20:53
It's the year that Charlie Chaplin signs his first movie contract and Louis Armstrong picks up a trumpet. In New York, the first edition of Vanity Fair is published, and in Essen, the first Aldi supermarket opens its doors. But "the capital of modern age anno 1913" is Vienna, and its "star players" the likes of Freud, Schnitzler, Schiele, Klimt, Loos, Wittgenstein and Kokoschka: "Here the battles raged: about the unconscious, about dreams, the new music, the new way of seeing, the new architectu... Read Full Story
The Son by Philipp Meyer
19 Jul 2013 03:58:07
In the first few pages of The Son, Philipp Meyer's followup to the highly praised American Rust, a 100-year-old man called Eli McCullough describes the Texas he knew, before its glories were trampled: "the land and all the animals who lived upon it were fat and slick. Grass up to the chest, the soil deep and black in the bottoms and even the steepest hillsides overrun with wildflowers … the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today." Eli had come to Texas as the child of ... Read Full Story
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth
19 Jul 2013 03:54:28
I thought about my student days as I removed this book from its Jiffy bag. Oh my God, I thought, here it is again. I remember trying to think – this is more a university memory than an A-level memory, but the principle is the same – of something to say about Lyrical Ballads that hadn't been said a hundred thousand times before, and being utterly confident that I wouldn't be able to do so.
And yet – there must be some suitably Wordsworthian lines to describe this phenomenon – sometimes, when som... Read Full Story
Disrael by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young
19 Jul 2013 03:53:24
Although Douglas Hurd is a Tory magnifico and his collaborator, Edward Young, served as David Cameron's speechwriter, their book is far from a hagiography of their party's idol. Their explanations of who Disraeli was, what he thought and wanted, how he operated, and whether his achievements and influence endured, are unflattering. The book is more a study in character – of the swift reactions of a volatile, opportunistic and irresponsible egotist to changing circumstances – than a staid politica... Read Full Story
Bitter Experience Has Taught Me by Nicholas Lezard
17 Jul 2013 01:33:37
The book is essentially a collection of 850-word pieces, with occasional chapter divisions that seem to be there for the sake of appearance rather than of thematic function. So it is a good thing that Lezard is such an entertaining companion. Fancy reading about the day he bought a toaster? It's the way he tells it.
There is a narrative arc, of sorts. After 19 years of marriage, Lezard's wife and mother of his three children – he had written about fatherhood in a Guardian column called Slack Da... Read Full Story
The End of Night by Paul Bogard
17 Jul 2013 01:27:53
The subject is a fertile one – though predictably the answers prove somewhat melancholy – and Bogard sets about his investigations with an energetic purposiveness and enterprise. The bulk of his research involves locations in the United States, but the American landmass is a large and various one, including a wide variety of terrains. In addition, Bogard hops about the globe, to Paris, to Florence, to the Canaries, to the Isle of Sark, like some benign necromancer seeking darkness where he can f... Read Full Story
