Getting Down to the Bare Bones
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe Scottish crime writer Val McDermid is a fan of forensic scientists. She points out that they ‘are willing to engage with the darkest and most frightening aspect of human behaviour on a daily basis’ and make sacrifices for the sake of justice. They appreciate their champion too. McDermid played a crucial role in mobilising […]
Nobble Concerns
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyPhilip Murdstone is the author of sensitive, award-winning young-adult novels that don’t sell. Living on Dartmoor, in love with his agent, Minerva, and in despair, he is told that he must write a fantasy novel or die in poverty.
Travels with My Elephant
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyJahan, the narrator of this richly textured, lusciously expansive historical novel, begins and ends the book by running away, seeking a peace that will never come. He escapes from his abusive stepfather and arrives (thanks to an English captain who works for the Ottomans) in 16th-century Istanbul, a ‘city of slanders and echoes’. It is […]
Wheel of Fortune
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyBarbara Parker, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s new novel, is, we are told, ‘pin-up sexy, all legs and bosoms and blonde hair’. She is also a talented and quick-witted actress who, escaping her hometown of Blackpool on the day when she wins the town’s beauty contest, comes to London in 1964 to seek her fortune. […]
Death Comes at the Beginning
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe End of Days, the new novel by German writer and opera director Jenny Erpenbeck, starts at the turn of the 20th century, with the accidental death of an eight-month-old Jewish girl in Galicia. Traumatised by this loss, her father flees to America and her abandoned mother becomes a prostitute. At this point, Erpenbeck pauses […]
Lives on the Edge
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyAs a novelist Rose Tremain is remarkable for the range and vibrancy of her fiction, her ability to move between form, time, gender and genre. Short stories are a perfect showcase for her talents. Her fifth collection, The American Lover, includes an anxious 19th-century fisherman, an imaginative evocation of a role model for Mrs Danvers, […]
The Gramps Shuffle
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyRichard Ford once confessed to John Updike that had Updike not shown that a multi-volume, decades-spanning suburban saga centred on an American everyman could be written, Ford’s own, hugely feted Bascombe series – of which Let Me Be Frank with You is the fourth and arguably best instalment – would never have materialised. Like the […]
Tape Measures
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThe exemplary creative writers of our time – we may as well admit it – are not the novelists but the computer coders. As algorithms and subroutines have become the infrastructure of our daily digital lives, the writers of code have fulfilled the novelist’s dream, building alternate worlds out of language. Does it matter that […]
One from the Heartland
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyYou wait for years to read a trilogy set in Iowa and then two come along at once. This autumn, Marilynne Robinson’s Lila completes her searching trilogy of redemption and spirituality in fictional Gilead, Iowa; Jane Smiley’s Some Luck is the first volume of The Last One Hundred Years, her Iowa-centric saga of American life […]
Erol Ozkoray
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyOn 23 September Erol Ozkoray, a Turkish journalist, publisher and intellectual, received a suspended sentence of eleven months and twenty days in prison, after being accused of defaming the authoritarian president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in his book about the Gezi Park protests. In May 2013, a small group of environmental campaigners conducted a […]
Consider the Paperclip
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyWhat links ‘weis’, ‘regal’, ‘herculean reversible’ and ‘owl’ or, for that matter, ‘caoutchouc’, ‘hevea’, ‘olli’ and ‘kik’? If you’ve already cried out ‘paperclips’ and ‘substances used to make erasers’ you’ll probably enjoy Adventures in Stationery, James Ward’s debut, for the satisfaction of having your impressive knowledge of the history and development of stationery confirmed. Ward […]
Voice of the Beehive
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyThere are few apiarian observances that appeal to the imagination like the practice of ‘telling the bees’. Making its way from Britain to the USA in the 19th century, the tradition held that on the occasion of death or marriage, tidings should be carried to the bees and their hives decorated appropriately. It’s not difficult […]
Flak Jacket to Dust Jacket
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn Men at War, Christopher Coker, a professor of international relations at the LSE, picks over the last three thousand years of warfare in literature to see ‘what fiction tells us about war’s hold on the imagination of young men and the way it makes – and breaks – them’. From The Iliad to World […]
Surrender Junkies
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn October 1964, audiences all over America gathered to watch a film entitled The Americanization of Emily. Directed by Arthur Hiller, it starred celebrated movie personalities Julie Andrews (playing Emily, who enjoys living a decadent, ‘American’ lifestyle), James Garner, Melvyn Douglas and James Coburn. The film is a playful defence of cowardice. Set in wartime […]
No Place like Home
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIf he were on the Left, Roger Scruton would be one of our towering public intellectuals; but it is a peculiarity of our age that conservative thinkers occupy a space beyond the mental horizons of most commissioning editors. There will always be right-wing columnists of the Richard Littlejohn variety, but a right-wing professor whose writings […]
Old Masters
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyIn their preface to Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome, Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke say that they were encouraged by participants in a Radio 3 series ‘to produce this book in which we explore the modern relevance of twelve Greek and Roman authors’. Whatever encouragement they received, this is not a promising opening. One […]
Tales of the Workhouse
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyFamily history – as Alison Light pithily observes in her intriguing addition to a thriving genre – is an addictive enterprise. Since 1990, family history searches have become the third most popular area of activity online in Britain (after shopping and pornography). Only the social level has undergone a change. Where obsequious librarians used to […]
Final Words
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyAs a surgeon at a leading American hospital and professor of surgery at Harvard, Atul Gawande enjoys a high-status, well-paid and privileged position in society. And yet, for his fourth book, he has chosen one of the lowest-status and most neglected subjects: dying. Thank goodness that he has. Gawande is not, by a long chalk, […]
In Royal Company
Posted on by Frank BrinkleyAs a child, I listened entranced to a radio serialisation of David Scott Daniell’s historical novel Hunt Royal. Both the story and the accompanying music by Purcell were thrilling. This tale of Charles II’s escape after the Battle of Worcester, related by the king himself to his wife and courtiers, was full of romance and […]
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Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
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India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
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Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
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