Presidential ratings usually drop after the speech. It was a tense moment in the West Wing. Less than a year into a new president’s term, a Senate seat was slipping to the opposition and taking with it the balance of power in the upper chamber. The president’s agenda was suddenly at risk. If this sounds [...]
Archive for January, 2010
The State of the Union Is No ‘Reset’ Button
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Roy and Lesley Adkins’s top 10 Nelson books
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Where do you start with the hundreds of books about Horatio Nelson? To mark his 250th birthday, two historians single out the 10 best Everyone’s favourite vice-admiral … Lord Nelson. Roy and Lesley Adkins’s many books include Trafalgar, which tells the story of the war at sea in Napoleonic times, and their latest book Jack [...]
Why ObamaCare Isn’t Flying
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
It was foolish of President Obama to think he could reform 16% of the nation’s economy. This is the sound of President Obama’s health-care reform bill crashing to earth: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday: “We’re not on health care now. We talked a lot about it in the past.” Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein: [...]
Tana French’s top 10 maverick mysteries
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
From PD James to Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt, the novelist picks the books that defy all the thriller’s conventions – but remain thrilling Rule breaker … Matt Damon as Tom Ripley. Tana French trained as an actor at Trinity College, Dublin, and has worked in theatre, film and voiceover. Her first novel, In the [...]
Esther Woolfson’s top 10 birds in fact and fiction
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
The prize-winning nature writer lists her favourite instances of birds in literature across the ages The early bird catches the book worm. The books I most enjoy that feature birds aren’t necessarily the ones in which birds are at the forefront. In the factual ones they are. But in fiction I like a hint of [...]
Peter K Austin’s top 10 endangered languages
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
The linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection from the thousands of languages on the brink of disappearing On the way out … Khomani men visit ancestral burial grounds in South Africa. Peter K Austin has published 11 books on minority and endangered languages, including 12 Australian Aboriginal languages, and holds the Märit Rausing [...]
Eli Gottlieb’s top 10 scenes from the battle of the sexes
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Wedded bliss … Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Eli Gottlieb’s debut novel, The Boy Who Went Away, won the Rome prize and the McKitterick prize. He began his career as a poet in New York, worked for US Elle magazine, then lived in Italy for six years. Now You [...]
Jessica Duchen’s top 10 literary Gypsies
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Gypsy Girl mosaic from excavations in Zeugma, Turkey Jessica Duchen is a novelist, biographer and classical music journalist. Her writings include biographies of composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Gabriel Fauré, and a classical music blog. She was born and lives in London. “It was music, especially my passion for the violin, that drew me to [...]
Clive Sinclair’s top 10 westerns
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
A wide range of stories … Alan Ladd in Shane. Clive Sinclair is the author of several novels and short stories, as well as a collection of essays on “the facts of life and the facts of death”. Included in Granta’s original list of Best Young British Novelists, he has also received a Somerset Maugham [...]
Danny Fingeroth’s top 10 graphic novels
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Mixing the personal with the political’ … Persepolis. Danny Fingeroth is an American comic book writer and editor. He was group editor of Marvel comics’ Spider-Man books, and is the author of many comics for Marvel. An expert on superheroes, he is the author of Superman on the Couch, among other works. His latest book [...]
Catherine Sampson’s top 10 books on Beijing
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
The newly built Herzog de Meuron Olympic stadium in Beijing. Catherine Sampson has lived in China for more than 15 years. Her fourth crime novel, The Slaughter Pavilion, is set in Beijing and features private detective Song Ren. It will be published in hardback by Macmillan on September 5. Her third novel, The Pool [...]
Lee Rourke’s top 10 books about boredom
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Lee Rourke’s debut collection of short stories Everyday is published by London’s Social Disease Publishing. He is the editor of the literary magazine Scarecrow and is reviews/contributing editor at 3AM Magazine. “Boredom has always fascinated me. I suppose it is the Heideggerian sense of ‘profound boredom’ that intrigues me the most. What he called a [...]
Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Simon Critchley was born in Hertfordshire in 1960, and currently lives and works in New York as Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He failed dramatically at school before failing in a large number of punk bands in the late 70s and failing as a poet some time later. This was [...]
Romesh Gunesekera’s top 10 island books
Posted in Literature on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Romesh Gunesekera was born in Sri Lanka in 1954 and moved to Britain in 1971. His first novel Reef was short-listed in 1994 for both the Booker and the Guardian Fiction Prizes. Ever since, islands – real and imaginary – have played an important role in his books. This summer, he will be spending a [...]
Berlin to Resurrect its Disgraced Monuments
Posted in History, tagged Germany on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Hello Lenin’ The granite head of the Lenin Statue being removed from eastern Berlin’s Lenin Square (now called United Nations Square) in 1991. In a sign of how time is healing Berlin’s wounds, the city plans to dig up the giant Lenin monument it famously buried in 1991 and place it in a new museum [...]
Can Climate Forecasts Still Be Trusted?
Posted in Energy and Environment on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Confidence Melting Away First, it was a series of e-mails that led many to begin doubting the veracity of climate scientists. Then, the United Nations climate body itself had to reverse dire predictions about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains. Other claims have raised doubts as well. K2 in the Himalayas. Making mistakes [...]
Babelicious!
Posted in Language on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Bigger languages are also simpler ones WHY do some languages drip with verb endings, declensions that show how a noun is used, and other grammatical bits and pieces, while others rely on word order and context? The former category tends to include languages spoken by small groups in isolated settings like the Amazon or New [...]
Just history
Posted in Strange but true on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
A Canadian misunderstanding A magazine’s Scunthorpe problem No, it’s not a pussy CANADIANS have long been proud of the industrious beaver, an animal capable of cutting down 216 trees a year with its teeth and of surviving the long winter in a purpose-built lodge made of mud, twigs and bark. The largest rodent in North [...]
Americans elected a visionary, not a fighter
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
In the run-up to Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, the so-called narrative question is whether the president will be — pick a curtain — party leader, president, conciliator or fighter. Depending on whose head is talking, the president’s problem is that he’s been: (a) playing party politics and not leading the nation; (b) [...]
State of the Union, in Dutch
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on January 27, 2010 | Comments Off
Americans tend to think of the State of the Union as our singular event. But while it is a special night, it’s not unique. In fact, leaders around the world deliver a yearly address in which they step onto the podium to score points, lay out agendas and offer up a flourish or two. So [...]
Charlie Higson’s top 10 Bond villains
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
To mark the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth later this month, Charlie Higson, the author of the bestselling Young Bond series, has chosen his favourite Bond villains. The latest Young Bond, Hurricane Gold, is out in paperback on May 29. The next Young Bond, By Royal Command, is published in September 2008 1. Blofeld [...]
Andy Cave’s top 10 books on Alpinism
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Andy Cave was born into a mining family and is now a cutting-edge Alpinist with several formidable first ascents to his credit. Learning to Breathe, his first book, was joint winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize 2005. His new book, Thin White Line, is a journey into the mind of an ‘extreme mountaineer’. For me, [...]
Sarah Anderson’s top 10 books about wilderness
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Founder of the innovative Travel Bookshop that formed the setting for the movie Notting Hill, Sarah Anderson has written several travel books. At the age of 10, Anderson’s arm was amputated as a result of a rare but virulent strain of cancer. Published this month, Halfway to Venus dwells upon the author’s experience as a [...]
Michael Symmons Roberts’s top 10 books about civil war
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Winner of the 2004 Whitbread poetry prize for his collection Corpus, Michael Symmons Roberts has published four highly acclaimed volumes of poetry to date. He is currently working on a project for Welsh National Opera with composer James Macmillan, and his second novel, Breath, is published by Jonathan Cape on March 13. “I went to [...]
Tim Harford’s top 10 undercover economics books
Posted in Editorials and opinion on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Tim Harford’s new book, The Logic of Life: Uncovering the new economics of everything, argues that the most unexpected people – oversexed teenagers, Las Vegas slot addicts, juvenile delinquents and even your boss – are rational, unconsciously weighing up risks and rewards and complying with economic logic. The author of The Undercover Economist, Harford is [...]
James Hopkin’s top 10 Polish books
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
James Hopkin won an Arts Council short story competition with ‘Even the Crows Say Krakow’. His debut novel, Winter Under Water, set in several cities across Europe, was published in paperback by Picador last week. Poland has made a significant contribution to world culture, not least in the field of literature. I first visited the [...]
Freya North’s top 10 romps and romances
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Freya North’s first novel, Sally, was one of the publishing successes of 1996, and was followed by Chloe, Polly and Cat, all bestsellers. Her latest novel, Pillow Talk, won the Romantic Novel of the Year award earlier this month. Throughout my life, romantic fiction has sustained me. I read recently that, as a genre, it [...]
Tim Butcher’s top 10 books about Congo
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Tim Butcher’s first book, Blood River – A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, has just been selected as a Richard & Judy Book Club choice. It uses his expedition across the Congo to tell the region’s turbulent history. He has worked for The Daily Telegraph since 1991 specialising in reporting on awkward places at awkward [...]
Lisa Appignanesi’s top 10 books by and about Simone de Beauvoir
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Lisa Appignanesi is a writer, novelist and president of English PEN. Her new book, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (Virago/Little Brown) comes out in February. Her latest novel, The Memory Man (Arcadia) is published at the same time in paperback. Amongst her other books is the [...]
Peter Ashley’s top 10 railway poems
Posted in Literature on January 26, 2010 | Comments Off
Peter Ashley is the editor of Railway Rhymes, an Everyman collection of poems celebrating the railway and published to coincide with the opening of St Pancras International. Here, Peter Ashley picks his favourite poems from the anthology. 1. The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin “That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty [...]
