Memoirs do not have to be sensational or celebrity-driven to move us. The crime writer Laura Lippman picks her favourite tales of the quotidian ‘I am drawn to stories about the quotidian – marriage, friendship, childhood, work, life, death’. The crime writer Laura Lippman was a reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at the [...]
Archive for January, 2010
Laura Lippman’s top 10 memorable memoirs
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Camilla Läckberg’s top 10 Swedish crime novels
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
There seems to be an endless supply of great Swedish crime writers. One of the latest northern stars to be translated, Camilla Läckberg, here picks out her own strongest suspects Bleak outlook … a burial ground on Kurt Wallander’s beat in Ystad. Born in 1974, Camilla Läckberg began her working life as an economist, but [...]
Leonardo Padura’s top 10 Cuban novels
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Hemingway and Hijuelos are here, but the author of the Havana Quartet also looks beyond the Cuba we think we know to introduce some of the island’s more hidden literary treasures A view beyond the cliches … Two musicians on the sea wall in Havana. Leonardo Padura was born in 1955 in Havana and lives [...]
Patrick Tyler’s top 10 ‘eccentric’ Middle East books
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Unexpected perspectives … Moshe Dayan visiting troops during the 1973 War. Patrick Tyler has spent 30 years as a journalist for the New York Times and Washington Post, dividing his time between Washington, and tours in the Middle East, China, Russia and Europe. As chief correspondent for the New York Times he reported from Baghdad [...]
Lindsey Davis’s top 10 Roman books
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The classical thriller writer winnows down a lifetime’s reading into the very best reads about the eternal city An excellent overview … the Colosseum. In 1989, Lindsey Davis published The Silver Pigs, her first detective novel set in classical Rome, introducing the world to maverick classical PI and poet Falco, who has carried on his [...]
Hugh Thomson’s top 10 South American journeys
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
From Waugh to Lawrence, writer after writer has come to the continent looking for adventure. The author of The White Rock picks out the best Rodrigo De la Serna and Gael García Bernal in the film version of The Motorcycle Diaries. Writer and film-maker Hugh Thomson has led numerous research expeditions to Peru. The books [...]
John Reader’s top 10 potato books
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Spuds you’ll love. Published this month, John Reader’s The Untold History of the Potato charts the tuber’s 15,000-year story from the US to China to Peru, Mrs Beeton to Charles Darwin to McDonald’s. Here, he chooses his top 10 books on the not-so-humble spud. 1. History and Social Influence of the Potato by Redcliffe Salaman [...]
Karl O Knausgaard’s top 10 angel books
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Karl O Knausgaard picks his favourite depictions of these not always divine creatures Light projection of a ‘Celestial concert of musician angels’ onto Le Mans Saint-Julien cathedral, western France. Karl O Knausgaard is the author of A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, which reimagines key moments when men have come face to face with [...]
The handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect: the scandal grows
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the [...]
Redcoats Coming, Nobody Home
Posted in History on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Thomas Jefferson’s wartime ‘dark period’ was marked by inglorious retreats The war must have seemed very far away from Monticello on those evenings in 1779 when Thomas Jefferson joined a Hessian prisoner of war in a violin duet, with Martha Jefferson accompanying them on the pianoforte, while Baroness Riedesel, the regal wife of the captive [...]
The State of the Union address reveals a president of two minds
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Barack Obama tiptoed Wednesday night along the seam that bifurcates the Democratic Party’s brain. The seam separates that brain’s John Quincy Adams lobe from its Sigmund Freud lobe. The dominant liberal lobe favors Adams’s dictum that politicians should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” It exhorts Democrats to smack Americans with what [...]
J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91
Posted in Literature on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he [...]
Looking North
Posted in Other, tagged North Korea on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
In North Korea, an ideology of racial superiority and a grim daily existence. A South Korean professor of my acquaintance recently told me about a conference he attended in Beijing last year at which he met a North Korean scholar. The man from the North approached him to follow up on a statistic that the [...]
The Obama Contradiction
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Washington is sick and broken—and it can solve all our problems. When you watch a president give a State of the Union Address on television, you’re always watching three people: the president at the podium, and the vice president and House speaker on the rise behind him. As a TV shot it’s awkward. The vice [...]
Why the Fetish About Footnotes?
Posted in Other on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
In the world of academe, Web clicking would be too easy. Is there a college graduate alive who doesn’t react to the words “footnotes” and “bibliography” with at least a small shiver of lingering dread? But while the citations, the style manuals, the numbering, the numbing tedium are just unpleasant memories to folks who now [...]
Audubon, Haiti and Cruel Fate
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Birds of America on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Even the bird paintings were Inspired by his birthplace and reflect the fleeting nature of existence. Since their publication in the 19th century, the 435 bird pictures in John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” have become an iconic piece of Americana. But their peculiar and sometimes elegiac sensibility, so alert to the fleeting nature [...]
On Thin Ice: Two Russians Skate Off the Reservation
Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Living on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
A loin-clothed homage to Aboriginal peoples backfires. Russian figure-skaters Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, who have been favorites to win gold medals at next month’s Vancouver Olympics, thought they had found an admirably multicultural theme for their ice-dancing routine—an homage to aboriginal peoples. In it, they leap and dance and spin to a hip-hoppy track [...]
Obama Owes the High Court an Apology
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The justices were there as a courtesy to him. In his State of the Union address, the president of the United States called out the Supreme Court by name for sharp condemnation and egged on his congressional supporters to jeer its recent decision: “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open [...]
Obama v. the Supremes
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Alito wins the oral, and factual, argument. In the case of Barack Obama v. Supreme Court of the United States, that was some oral argument on Wednesday night. With the Justices arrayed a few feet in front of him in the House chamber, President Obama blistered their recent decision defending free political speech for corporations [...]
Bonfire of the Populists
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The president’s anti-Wall Street rhetoric is not good for the economy, and may hurt his party politically. The problem with fires is that they can blow in any direction. Consider the White House, which is seeing a backdraft from the anti-Wall-Street flame it has been dousing with gasoline. His agenda on the ropes, President Obama [...]
Despite Assurances, Met Finds Artworks Aren’t Restored Overnight
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
From left, Tullio Lombardo’s “Adam” before it was damaged and virtual images of restoration and of degrees of stress. After a museumgoer’s trip and fall opened a rip in a century-old Picasso painting last week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, officials there assured the public that — nightmarish as accidents are at a place [...]
Study Offers an Insight Into Dinosaur Colors
Posted in Natural sciences on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx, sporting their orange and white striped tails. What color were dinosaurs? Well, at least one of them had a feathered mohawk tail in a subdued palette of chestnut and white stripes. That is what a team of Chinese and British scientists reported Wednesday in Nature, providing the first clear evidence of [...]
Staying the Course
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The same agenda in more humble clothes. So much for all of that Washington talk about a midcourse change of political direction. If President Obama took any lesson from his party’s recent drubbing in Massachusetts, and its decline in the polls, it seems to be that he should keep doing what he’s been doing, only [...]
The limits to verbiage
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 28, 2010 | Comments Off
The state-of-the-union speech The president’s speech was underwhelming, which was probably better than the alternative ONE thing you can generally count on when the lanky figure of Barack Obama approaches a podium is that you will hear a good speech; and the more trouble he is in, the better the speech is likely to be. [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 111 on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Poem of the week: La Gioconda by Michael Field An intriguing bit of ekphrastic poetry from a very intriguing pseudonymous pair ‘Historic, side-long, implicating eyes’ … La Gioconda Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait of La Gioconda, more familiarly known as the Mona Lisa has fascinated many writers, her famously inscrutable half-smile a powerful stimulus for imaginative [...]
Ten of the best visits to Venice in literature
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence In the midst of her affair with Mellors, Constance Chatterley swans off to Venice to have some kind of husband-approved liaison so that she might get pregnant. She hangs out with tedious émigrés and can’t wait to get back to the Nottinghamshire woods. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh Sebastian [...]
Charlie English’s top 10 snow books
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
White magic … Ethan Hawke in the film of Snow Falling on Cedars. Charlie English’s first book, The Snow Tourist, is part eulogy, part history, part quest for the best snow on the planet. I don’t remember exactly when I saw my first snow, but I do recall thinking as a child that I could [...]
Peter Washington’s top 10 ghost stories
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
The short story is the perfect format for the ghost stories. Today is the perfect day to be reading them. And these are some of the most perfect examples Supernatural advisory … Rebecca Evans in Benjamin Britten’s opera version of The Turn of the Screw. The ghost story flourished especially between 1880 and 1930 when [...]
Justin Scroggie’s top 10 secret signs
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
There’s little so pleasing as a secret message from the author for the quick-witted to dig out In the know … symbols in a Masonic temple. I’m an author (and television producer) with a passion for secret signs – all the ways that people in the know privately communicate with each other. I love books [...]
Philip Hoare’s top 10 whale tales
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
There is more to whale-based literature than just Moby-Dick, writes the social historian and author of Leviathan, or The Whale Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan I have been fascinated by whales since I was a boy and saw a performing orca at Windsor Safari Park. But it was only when I saw my first whales [...]
