Category: Books
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How easy to read is Jane Austen?
Sparkling with wit, Jane Austen’s graceful style is even more reader-friendly than the language of newspapers. So are the first chapters of literary classics like David Copperfield and Sons and Lovers. They are all easier to read than newspapers. That’s what I found in a readability test that looked at…
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To Kill a Mockingbird: The real Atticus, the real Dill
Fifty years ago this month, an unknown young writer from Alabama published her first novel. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, still sells almost a million copies a year. Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, the only biography of the writer, talks…
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World Cup poem by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy
A new poem by the poet laureate in response to England’s dismal Fifa World Cup run. The Shirt by Carol Ann Duffy Afterwards, I found him alone at the bar and asked him what went wrong. It’s the shirt, he said. When I pull it on it hangs on my…
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Harold Evans on Murdoch, sub-editors, copy editors
Anyone who loves newspapers and magazines will enjoy reading My Paper Chase, the memoirs of Harold Evans, whose wife, Tina Brown, edits The Daily Beast. The son of a railwayman, he became the most famous British newspaper editor of his time. He edited the Sunday Times for more than a…
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Martin Amis on life and Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father’s death, it’s one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read. He writes: Why should I tell the story of my…
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Martin Amis on life and Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis (left) describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis (below), in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father’s death, it’s one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read.
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Shakespeare’s bawdy
William Shakespeare was baptized on this day in 1564 and what a life he led before he died at the age of 52 on April 23, 1616. He explored love and sex in his plays with a detailed vividness that leaves Masters and Johnson looking pretty skimpy, writes Simon Callow…
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Shakespeare: Much ado about love
It’s that day of the year when we remember William Shakespeare. Here’s a link to the most famous scene from my wife’s favourite play —– Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene. But give me the romantic comedies any day. Boy meets, boy gets girl, and they live…
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Auden’s September 1, 1939
If asked to name my favourite poem by WH Auden, I would probably say In Memory of WB Yeats though I like any number of his poems: The Unknown Citizen, Lay Your Sleeping Head My Love, O Tell Me the Truth about Love, Funeral Blues, Refugee Blues, Night Mail… See,…
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