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Roger McGough, who stands a chance of being voted Britain’s favourite poet, has another claim to fame. He was a member of the band, The Scaffold, that topped the BBC Top 20 chart with the hit single, Lily The Pink, in 1968. The trio also included Paul McCartney’s brother, Mike McGear (real name Mike McCartney),
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Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate, but who is Britain’s favourite poet? The BBC poetry site is running an online poll which closes on September 1. Voters can choose from a shortlist of 30 poets selected by a panel of judges. One can vote for TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas, WH Auden, John
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Will the Lord Of The Flies author William Golding now be remembered as a would-be rapist, asks the Guardian. Golding, who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, three years after bagging the Booker for Rites Of Passage, admitted trying to rape a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he was an 18-year-old student at Oxford, according to a
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Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong invoked the Garden of Eden while talking about the racial and religious harmony that exists in Singapore. (See previous post.) I love Singapore but never thought of it in those terms. For what is the Garden of Eden but a paradise lost? I am sorry I can’t help being
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The news that Vikram Seth is writing a sequel to A Suitable Boy, my favourite novel, had me reaching for another book I love: The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh. What set me off was an interview Seth gave to The Hindu newspaper in India. The sequel, A Suitable Girl, will be set in the
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Nandan Nilekani’s book, Imagining India, has been called both exhaustive and exhausting. It is a big book – a clear-eyed look at one of the world’s fastest growing economies where, nevertheless, millions are still poor and illiterate. For a quick summary by the author himself, watch this video. Nilekani begins by pointing out India with
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India is an unlikely economic giant. The vast majority of its people don’t even have steady jobs, points out Edward Luce in his insightful book on India. Fewer than 40 million of its 470 million workforce are employed in the “organized sector”, which offers job protection and other benefits. The government and the public sector
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Frank McCourt loved “smart-ass English authors” like Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh but his favourite was PG Wodehouse, he says in this video. More interesting is what he says about poverty: We were ashamed. My mother was ashamed of being poor.The poor were ashamed of being poor. You don’t come out of the slum walking
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I can’t wait to read Elijah Wald’s How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll. The New York Times reviewing this history of popular music says: While Wald never says in so many words that the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, he does take a stance several degrees removed from standard-issue Beatles worship. He suggests that
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Singapore’s Raffles Hotel and the Bengali writer Sankar (real name Mani Shankar Mukherjee) both feature in Brick Lane author Monica Ali’s excellent essay on hotels and writers. The essay in the British magazine Prospect follows the publication of her hotel-based novel, In The Kitchen, which I am dying to read. Ali praises Sankar’s popular Bengali
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