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Congratulations, Sir Salman! Kudos to Tony Blair and the Labour government for giving Salman Rushdie (picture taken from the BBC) a knighthood. I haven’t been blogging since my wife arrived from Calcutta (Kolkata) late last month to spend a month with me in Singapore. But how could I ignore the news of Rushdie being knighted
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In Cold Blood by Truman Capote The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there”. Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West
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“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,Or what’s a heaven for?” I love those lines by Robert Browning though I am not quite sure what he means. They sound grand in their limitless ambition. The irony is the speaker is the painter Andrea Del Sarto who has no illusions left. He knows his
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Shashi Tharoor, the Indian diplomat who stood for the post of United Nations secretary-general last year but was rejected by the Americans in favour of the South Korean Ban Ki Moon, quietly dropped a bombshell in his book, Nehru: The Invention of India, published four years ago. India could have apparently become a permanent member
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Isn’t it strange that the only other American president whose father had also been president came to power like George W Bush, despite losing the popular election? John Quincy Adams, who like Bush also shared his father’s first name, tried to reach out to the opposition when he gave his inaugural address in 1825. Not
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I was surprised when a New York Times book reviewer writing about a history of thrillers said he had never read John Sandford. He is one of the best American crime writers in business. Sandford writes about cops and robbers as entertainingly as Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and the most critically acclaimed of
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Clockwise from top left, the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, author Salman Rushdie, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his mentor Gandhi, rock star Freddie Mercury, the world’s biggest steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. They were the seven ethnic Indians featured in Time magazine’s 60 Years of Asian Heroes special
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Actually, there would be two if the hero-cum-narrator would get it on with the babysitter who has a crush on him. But Penn Cage is no Nabokov hero. He springs from the pen — or was it the keyboard? — of the New York Times bestselling novelist Greg Iles who knows where to draw the
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Clockwise from top left: Amis, Pinter, Naipaul, Rushdie, Rankin, Stoppard, Rowling and Hornby (in the centre). If Martin Amis isn’t Britain’s greatest living author, who is? asks the Guardian today. Amis is certainly the flashiest. His brilliance with words simply dazzles. No one comes close except Salman Rushdie, whose name also came up in the
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Scott Fitzgerald and video of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Now I know why Scott Fizgerald is considered one of the finest American writers. I just finished reading The Great Gatsby. This little novel, just over a hundred pages long, is an absolute gem, a love story that’s also a morality
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