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Clive James on empire, Naipaul, and music
Books are like the web. I wanted to read more books by Clive James after reading one of his essays that led me to other authors. Along the way, James disclosed the secret of success in the arts. I will share it, too, but patience! James is celebrated for his…
5–8 minutes -
Bing! This chatty search engine is a writer!
Bing is no longer just a search engine. It’s also a chatbot which can chat with you and write email, blog posts and articles. The new Bing is powered by GPT 4, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Open AI, an American research laboratory in which Microsoft has invested billions…
5–7 minutes -
How to read a poem — and fall in love with poetry
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry is an exceptional book – a book on poetry that is sheer poetry. The author Edward Hirsch writes about poetry with a lyrical effusion. “I have tried to be as clear as possible… but I have also tried to…
10–16 minutes -
T.S. Eliot and Four Women
TS Eliot was the greatest English poet of the 20th century. American-born in St Louis, Missouri, he died a British citizen in London at the age of 76 on January 4, 1965 – the year after the Beatles invaded America and made their first film, A Hard Day’s Night. The…
9–14 minutes -
Salman Rushdie’s magical Victory City
VS Naipaul called Vijaynagar “the last great Hindu kingdom”. Now Salman Rushdie has brought it to life in Victory City, probably his breeziest novel since Haroun and the Sea of Stories, published more than 30 years ago. While Naipaul mourned the destruction of Vijaynagar by Muslim invaders in India: A…
4–5 minutes -
Love in Shakespeare’s sonnets
The website No Sweat Shakespeare singles these out as Shakespeare’s “famous sonnets”. They are no doubt famous. Most of them we had to read at school or college. And six out of these eight sonnets are addressed to a “fair youth”, a young man. The so-called Swinging Sixties and, for…
8–12 minutes -
ChatGPT assesses The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times
The chatbot ChatGPT with its amazing ability to write anything from poems to articles in no time at all has taken the world by storm. The media can’t stop talking about it. Fed and trained on reams of data, it can write on anything from Shakespeare to social media. Along…
5–8 minutes -
ChatGPT: A chatty, amazing writer
My initial encounter with ChatGPT left me in a state of shock and awe. Words sprouted on the web page as soon as I finished typing my request for a parody of Shakespeare. In a flash, ChatGPT churned out a poem addressing the Bard that went: “Let’s see, how could…
4–7 minutes -
Kolkata and Singapore
I wonder why there is no street named after Calcutta in Singapore, nor after Singapore in what is now Kolkata. For their histories are interlinked. Both were ruled by the British and share some street names. Both had Armenian Street, Synagogue Street, Elliot Road and roads, bridges and landmarks named…
5–8 minutes -
The magic and mayhem of Salman Rushdie
When Salman Rushdie graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in history in 1968 and said he wanted to be a writer, his father yelped in pain. “What,” he cried, “will I tell my friends?” Events eventually forced Anis Rushdie, a barrister who had also graduated from Cambridge, to change…
8–11 minutes
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