JD Salinger's secret life exposed in new documentary | Books. JD Salinger, the elusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, was one of America's most famous recluses and guarded his private life with fanatical dedication. Yet even he might have been impressed by the immense efforts being undertaken to keep details secret of a new documentary that has been made about his life and works. Called simply Salinger, the film is the brainchild of Shane Salerno, who has spent nine years writing, producing and directing the project, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. The move is a major shift in career for Salerno, best known as a writer of mainstream blockbusters such as Alien vs Predator: Requiem and Armageddon. But the promise of lifting the lid on the life of one of America's most revered writers has proven a massive lure to Hollywood.
Salinger has been bought up by independent film mogul Harvey Weinstein after he reportedly saw a private screening of it at 7.30 on the morning of the Oscars. That comment has drawn a swift rebuttal. JK Rowling on the first Harry Potter, Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall: glimpse authors' musings on their first editions | Books. Grammar rules everyone should follow. The Idler Academy's inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowed last week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee, but does it really display "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better"?
Hardly. Like many such gongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the Bad Grammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics by other means. One of the three judges was Toby Young, whose latest book is How to Set Up a Free School; Gove apparently told fellow guests at a Spectator party last year that he'd like Young to stand as a Tory MP. "The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing," Young said. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Whom is on the way out, and won't be much missed. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10 popular myths debunked | News. 'The benefits bill is spent on unemployed and disabled people' It's true that the Department for Work and Pensions is the biggest-spending government department in the UK, spending £166.98bn in 2011-12. Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits – an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That's 23% of all public spending. But ask people where that money goes and the assumptions are that it's on unemployment or incapacity benefit. It's followed by housing benefit of £16.94bn and disability living allowance of £12.57bn. 'You can fit the entire population of the world on the Isle of Wight' It's become an accepted truth that you could fit the entire population of the world, shoulder-to-shoulder, on the Isle of Wight.
The Isle of Wight is 380m square metres, so how many people could fit there? There are 5.2 billion adults and 1.9 billion children in the world. 'A third of the British population are immigrants' 'You're more likely to get bitten by a person than a dog' And yet. Home - Little Toller Books | Classics of nature writing and rural life. Holloway - Caught by the River. Robert Macfarlane gives us the background to, Holloway, his collaboration with the artist Stanley Donwood and the writer Dan Richards: Eight years ago this July, I drove down to Dorset with my friend Roger Deakin, to explore the holloways of the area around Chideock. Holloways – the word comes from the Anglo-Saxon hol weg, hollow way – are paths that, over centuries of use, have sunk down into the landscape through which they run, worn into the earth by footfall, wheel-roll and rain-rush.
Some of them are twenty feet deep and steep-sided: more ravine than road. Many have been overgrown by the trees that border them, so that they’ve become green-roofed tunnels. They’re too deep to fill in and farm, and often too narrow to take vehicles, so holloways are often wild places: filled with brambles, nettles, ferns, bees, badgers, ivy and history. In the autumn of 2011, I returned to the south Dorset holloways, this time in the company of two artist-writers, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards. I N T H E H O L L O W A Y. There has been a sort of quiet excitement surrounding the publication of the Faber & Faber edition of Holloway.
Demand was unaccountably high; Faber had to reprint the book four times before publication date because of pre-orders from bookshops, and the other week the book made it into the Sunday Times top ten hardback releases, which was both gratifying and hugely unexpected. It is, after all, a book about a hedge. Right, anyway, I forgot to mention that Caught By The River are selling prints of the five pictures I drew for the book.
You can buy them here, and they're £50 each. I printed them with Cefmor Tallboy on his magnificent clanking, clicking and wheezing 1960s Heidelberg platen press. . - 30th May 2013 Hello again. . - 24th May 2013 Should you wish to spend money there is an opportunity to do so here: www.faber.co.uk/holloway. . - 15th May 2013 - 5th May 2013 - 19th April 2013 And here it is, pictured on my carpet. . - 17th March 2013 I forget what I've written before. . - 10th January 2013. Going to Ground: Britain’s Holloways. The hidden, wild world of the holloway by Robert Macfarlane Photo: John Beatty HOLLOWAYS: from the Anglo-Saxon hola weg, meaning a “harrowed path,” a “sunken road.”
A route that centuries of use have eroded down into the bedrock, so that it is recessed beneath the level of the surrounding landscape. Most holloways will have started out as drove roads, paths to market. The oldest holloways date back to the early Iron Age. Holloways do not exist in the unyielding rock regions of the British archipelago, where the roads and paths stay high, riding the hard surface of the ground. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are the records of journeys to market, to worship, to sea. Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne (1788), made a typically attentive study of the holloways in his Hampshire parish.
To enter these holloways, White said, was to access a world of deep history, an unexpectedly wild world, buried amid the familiar and close-at-hand. The Natural History of Selborne. Graphic story: The River of Lost Souls by Isabel Greenberg.
I'll tell you what's wrong with Wetherspoon's - it's run by a man named Tim. I once asked Martin Amis how an interview had gone with a particular journalist and he thought for a moment before shrug-sneering, “Well, y’know, he was a Tim.” When I was a kid we used to stop on the school run to pick up the son of the then MP for King’s Lynn, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (not so much a wet as utterly saturated, he was the only Tory to defect to the SDP in 1981). Brocklebank-Fowler junior was called Tim, and my sadistic brother and I would tease him: “Timmy-Timmy-Timmy,” while he futilely protested that he was a Timothy. It’s my contention that the likes of, say, Tim Henman the tennis player, or Tim Parks the writer, would have had enjoyed a great deal more success if they’d simply changed their names. There’s a prejudice against people called Tim; true, it’s not on a par with racism, sexism or homophobia but there’s little doubt that your life chances will be constrained should your otherwise risk-averse parents have had the temerity to Tim you.
Sharon Gosling's top 10 children's steampunk books | Children's books. "The definition of what actually qualifies as steampunk is a debate that continues to rumble on, as does the question of why it has become so widely popular in the past few years. For me, steampunk is the plucky adventurousness of Victorian sensibilities re-imagined with extra, fantastical machinery. It's an attempt to see what would have happened if that era could have been even more plucky and adventurous than it already was. As for why it's become so popular, my feeling is that, at heart, we are all explorers. Yet there is little left of our own planet to explore now and no longer even the need to physically go out and find what is there in order to see it. Steampunk presents us with a new age of exploration and children are the greatest explorers of them all.
Books in the genre for youngsters of all ages are still quite thin on the shelves, but that's changing. 1. With the advent of modern steampunk, Verne's mechanical fantasies have been re-coined as "proto-steampunk". 2. 3. 4. Hilary Mantel: why novelists are deliberately misunderstood. My late grandfather John Junor was a very successful middle-market newspaper editor. He ran the Sunday Express for three decades and he used to be very firm on one subject. "I will not," he insisted, "have irony in this newspaper. " This is the problem at the root of poor old Hilary Mantel's clobbering yesterday by self-styled defenders of the Duchess of Cambridge including (woe!)
Our dim-witted balloon-on-a-stick of a prime minister. Mantel's long lecture about Kate, and the way we look at her, was full of irony. I don't mean irony in its vulgar meaning of "sarcasm", or the still more vulgar meaning of "saying something you don't really mean": but in the sense of inhabiting more than one position at once – of being able to observe something, but also to stand back and think about the way you are observing it, about the off-the-peg narratives and received ideas that shape your perceptions. Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. Hilary Mantel: bring up the royal bodies | Editorial. There is a generous explanation of yesterday's sudden furore about what Hilary Mantel said about the Duchess of Cambridge – a brief medialand frenzy into which both David Cameron and Ed Miliband foolishly allowed themselves to be drawn – and then there is the one that is probably true.
The generous explanation is that this is half-term. The rich and powerful are on trade missions to India and ski breaks in the Alps. It is therefore a bit of a slow news week, with the press scraping around for things to write about. In such circumstances, there is a gut logic in tapping into the media's monarchy mother lode, and fanning a controversy about what one of our leading writers has said about one of the most newsworthy royals – even though it was actually said two weeks before it erupted on to the front pages yesterday. The true explanation is that Ms Mantel's supposed attack on the duchess is no such thing. Libraries 'have had their day', says Horrible Histories author. Horrible historian ... Terry Deary (above) says libraries are damaging the book industry. Composite: Sarah Lee/Alamy Libraries "have been around too long" and are "no longer relevant", according to Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, an apparently lone literary voice to believe that libraries have "had their day".
Deary, a bestselling author who was also the seventh most-borrowed children's writer from UK libraries last year, was speaking as his local council in Sunderland became the latest authority to look into the possibility of closing branches to save money. But unlike other authors up and down the country, who have come together to protest the closures of their local branches, Deary was clear that libraries have had their day. But despite the negative reaction to his comments, the Horrible Histories author is adamant that the public attitude around libraries "has to change". Bookshops are closing down, he said, "because someone is giving away the product they are trying to sell.
TheNewerYork Press. Revisting Dickens | Looking at Charles Dickens from a New Perspective. English literature's 50 key moments from Marlowe to JK Rowling. BBC Radio Three is currently broadcasting a fascinating series on the "50 key works" of classical music. This is a spin-off from Howard Goodall's BBC2 television series and its tie-in book, The Story of Music (Chatto), and it crystallises – for the amateur listener – the turning points in the evolution of the classical tradition in the most enthralling way. Did you, for instance, know that Procul Harum's Whiter Shade of Pale contains a harmonic line that is pure Bach? So much for music. Following Radio 3, I've found myself speculating about the 50 key moments in the Anglo-American literary tradition.
Note: what follows is not merely a book list, but an attempt to identify some of the hinge moments in our literature – a composite of significant events, notable poems, plays, and novels, plus influential deaths, starting with the violent death of Shakespeare's one serious rival … 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. The Sturm und Drang moralism of Lynd Ward's amazing Six Novels in Woodcuts. Call me crazy. Flipping through the first wordless novel published in America, Gods' Man by Lynd Ward, which came out the week of the Great Crash of 1929, I kept thinking about Moby-Dick, one of the wordiest novels ever, illustrated the next year by Rockwell Kent.
Yes, Gods' Man is Moby-Dick without the text, the subtleties, or the whaling, if you can picture that—a silent moral tale of a man warring with his soul. Told in 139 wood engravings, Gods' Man opens with a small, tempest-tossed skiff. The waves seem to talk or at least gesticulate. There's a calm after the storm. The solo sailor salutes sun and clouds, then draws the scene. That plot summary's no joke. The moralism, if you think about it, is almost comically overdetermined by the medium—part and parcel of working wood with gouges. And then there is the issue of light, creation, and revelation.
In wood, it's almost impossible (or so it seems) to make intriguing plots and characters that aren't, well, a touch wooden. Timbuktu library is treasure house of centuries of Malian history | World news. Timbuktu's main library, officially called the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research, is a treasure house containing more than 20,000 manuscripts covering centuries of Mali's history. Named after the famous medieval writer and scholar, the manuscripts are housed in a purpose-built 4,600 sq metre (50,000 sq ft) complex completed in 2009 at a cost of around £5m. Designed by South African architects and replacing a crumbling 40-year-old building, the new institute features air conditioning to preserve the manuscripts and an automatic fire-fighting system.
It is not known how much damage was caused to the building, which had reportedly been used as a sleeping quarters by the Islamist fighters who seized it. Timbuktu's famous manuscripts, believed to number in the hundreds of thousands, mainly date from the 14th to 16th centuries, when the city was an important hub for trade and Islamic knowledge. Pranks, etc. British Hell's Angel and Skinhead novels of the 1970s. GENDER, SEXUALITY AND CONTROL Richard Allen, Mick Norman & Other New English Library Youthspoitation Novelists of the 1970s 'Tom grinned, bringing his fist down with a chopping motion on the back of the United fan's neck. He felt the blow jar his muscles. He kicked as the man slumped. Then the boots went in hard. Muffled moans lost themselves in the frantic chanting from the terraces. So reads the copy on the back of Richard Allen's 'Boot Boys.' 'Basically, Tom had a 'feeling' for violence.
‘Do-gooders would, no doubt, strive to prove some childhood moment when Tom had been victimised by his parents. Allen's books were not the only series that his publishers, New English Library (NEL), issued which gave expression to, and simultaneously depicted the containment of, youth violence and sexuality. 'These were not men of the nineteen-eighties, used to slick suits and the soft answer. 'The offices of the Daily Leader had erupted in a plume of death, and many had breathed their last. The Richard Allen Project. Proper Magazine — :: Issue 12 is here. The Colony Room Club 1948 -2008 | A History of Bohemian Soho.
Timeline Photos. LulzLit.