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It’s Valentine’s Day. So here are love poems as simple and heart-felt as the finest love songs. Brian Patten knows how to touch hearts and minds. The Mersey Sound, a slim Penguin paperback featuring poems by him, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough published in 1967, is one of the bestselling poetry anthologies of all time,
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On this day 20 years ago, Salman Rushdie was defending The Satanic Verses in a BBC interview, denying it was an attack on Islam. But the first blood had already been spilled with five people killed in violent agitation over the book in Islamabad, Pakistan. And the next day – tomorrow marks its 20th anniversary
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The World Is What It Is by Patrick French The book ends with Naipaul in tears leaning against a taxi cab after scattering the ashes of his wife, Pat, in a wood before returning to his home in Wiltshire. He sang the hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful, he told his biographer, Patrick French, who
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The Terrorist by John Updike India, not Iran, was the first to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses shortly after it came out in September 1988, reminds the Observer. The then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government banned the book under pressure from the opposition Janata Party. Both wanted the Muslim vote. It was only
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The Private Patient by PD James This is an Adam Dalgliesh mystery where the Scotland Yard detective enters late into the story. And even then Commander Dalgliesh hardly occupies centrestage. The focus keeps shifting from one character to another. His subordinates, Kate Miskin and Francis Benton-Smith, duly get their turn in the spotlight as do
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Diana Athill is 91 years old and won the 2008 Costa prize for biography for her memoir, Somewhere Towards The End, where she talks about her love affairs, her work as a book editor, and what it means to be growing old. She helped Andre Deutsch – who was briefly her lover — establish his
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Is Rumpole as popular as Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster? That’s what some British newspapers are claiming today following the death of his 85-year-old creator, Sir John Mortimer. There’s a wee bit of exaggeration, I think, a Bertie Wooster fan with immense respect for Sherlock Holmes. I just went through some of the short stories
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VS Naipaul advised aspiring writers to practise what he had learnt from his father, says Patrick French in his biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. When the Indian website Tehelka asked Naipaul to suggest some rules for aspiring writers, this was the advice he gave: Do not write long sentences. A sentence
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