Category: Books
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Must a poem have a meaning?
“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…
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Nehru and China
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…
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Reading Arthur Schlesinger
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…
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John Sandford: Good fun like Elmore Leonard
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…
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Freddie Mercury and other famous Indians
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…
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Whodunnit with an underage lover
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…
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Who is Britain’s greatest living author?
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…
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The Great Gatsby
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…
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Remembering WH Auden
This month marks Auden’s birth centenary, reminds the Guardian. He was born on Feb 21, 1907. He was the people’s poet, says the article in the Guardian. The writer, Theo Hobson, says: “Auden’s rise to fame in the 1930s is hard to believe now: it is impossible to imagine a…
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Lynne Truss.com
Eats, Shoots & Leaves author Lynne Truss now has her own website! So what? Every writer has a website now. Hello! This is big news, reported by Reuters. However, after visiting http://www.lynnetruss.com. I don’t think any punctuation mark can do it justice. It deserves an emoticon. Like this: 😦 Truss…
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