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Hilary Mantel became the first British writer to win the £50,000 Man Booker Prize since Alan Hollinghurst won the award for The Line of Beauty five years ago, in 2004. Mantel’s historical epic, Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, had been the popular favourite to win the award despite competition from strong
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The winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize will be announced at 10 pm tonight (UK time), says Man Booker. That will be early tomorrow morning in Asia. Meanwhile, here’s the buzz on the £50,000 Commonwealth literary award on Twitter and FriendFeed. Hear the BBC interviews with the six shortlisted authors — JM Coetzee, AS
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A British writer is likely to win the Man Booker Prize for the first time in five years when the winner is announced tomorrow. Unless the South African born Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee wins the Booker for the third time — and sets a new record in the Booker’s 41-year history. All the five
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Singapore’s Straits Times and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post are the only English language newspapers I know that do not allow their stories to be read online for free. Even the Financial Times allows some of its stories to be read for free. Not the Straits Times. All you can read for free on
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The Chinese are good at maths because their number words are remarkably brief, says Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers. He quotes from The Numbers Game by Stanislas Dehaene, who wrote: “Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for example, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English equivalents
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Officials fallen out of favour were said to be airbrushed out of pictures in the Soviet era. Something similar happens in Men In White, the history of Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party. Devan Nair vanishes from the pages of this book after he gives up his seat in parliament to become president in 1981. His
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Stop press! Men In White, the history of Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party, has been flying off the shelves of local bookstores and a third printing of 10,000 copies has been ordered, reports the Straits Times. Er, wouldn’t it be better to correct a few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors first? There are mistakes even
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The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess Anthony Burgess may be best known for A Clockwork Orange. But anyone with an interest in Southeast Asia should read The Malayan Trilogy. Like all good novels, this big book about the early years of Malaysia is both timeless and of its time. Set in the 1950s, it has
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Malaysia celebrated its 52nd independence anniversary recently. So how much has it changed since Anthony Burgess wrote about it in The Malayan Trilogy? The book is based on his experiences as an education officer in Malaysia in the 1950s. In his introduction to The Malayan Trilogy, he writes: “The Malays resented Chinese wealth and were
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This was the day Poland was invaded by Germany and Russia 70 years ago, marking the start of the Second World War. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, on September 3. Those wartime memories have now made Vera Lynn the oldest artiste to hit the charts. At the age of 92,
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