Hilary Spurling's top 10 unputdownable Chinese books. A father sees his seven-year-old son off at a railway station in Hefei, China. Illustration: Jianan Yu/Reuters Hilary Spurling is the award-winning biographer of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, George Orwell's wife, Sonia Orwell, and painter Henri Matisse. The second volume in her life of the painter, Matisse the Master: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954, won the 2005 Whitbread book of the year award. Burying The Bones by Hilary Spurling She will be discussing her new book, Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck's Life in China (Profile Books £15), at The Asia House Festival of Asian Literature on 11 May. www.festivalofasianliterature.com 1. This was the picture book that transfixed me as a child. 2. My mother read me this story before I could read myself, and it became inextricably mixed in my mind with Yui's pictures. 3. 4.
This excellent anthology gave me my first taste of Chinese poetry and its many flavours, as rich, complex and surprising as the same country's painting or cooking. 5. 6. 7. John Stammers's top 10 love poems. John Stammers is a poet and creative writing teacher. His first collection, Panoramic Lounge-Bar, won the Forward prize for best first collection in 2001 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry award. His second collection, Stolen Love Behaviour, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In a review for the Guardian, Charles Bainbridge wrote that it explored "the shady areas of libido and guilt, of bars, boudoirs and basements, the fragile underbelly of the hip and sophisticated. " He is the editor of the Picador Book of Love Poems. "If ever two were made for each other surely it is love and poetry: the infinite variety of love meeting the boundless capacity of poetry to embrace it. "It is a surprise, however, to find that the straightforward romantic paean is comparatively rare amongst great love poems. 1.
A romantic take on Horace's Carpe Diem in which the suitor desires to seize rather more than simply the day. 2. 3. The saddest poem ever written. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Harry Mount's top 10 essays. Harry Mount is a journalist, author and editor of the Notting Hill Editions Journal, which commissions a new essay every week. The latest series of essays are published this month. Buy Notting Hill Editions essays "There's not much point in trying to define an essay. Its parameters are so broad and slack that they encompass practically any shortish passage of non-fiction which makes a general argument. "As a rough rule of thumb, I'd say anything that creeps over 40,000 words is entering book territory; and anything too autobiographical strays into memoir.
"It sounds banal, but all that matters is quality of writing and thought. 1. Not an original choice of writer, or of essay. The word "intellectual" often brings a lot of dull baggage with it. 2. You might call Gellhorn's account of Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem reportage. 3. Evelyn Waugh considered life as a printer, cabinet-maker and carpenter before becoming a novelist. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Do the Classics Have a Future? by Mary Beard. The year 2011 has been an unusually good one for the late Terence Rattigan: Frank Langella starred on Broadway in his play Man and Boy (a topical tale of the collapse of a financier), its first production in New York since the 1960s; and a movie of The Deep Blue Sea, featuring Rachel Weisz as the wife of a judge who goes off with a pilot, premiered at the end of November in the UK and opens in the US in December.
It’s the centenary of Rattigan’s birth (he died in 1977), and it has brought the kind of reevaluation that centenaries often do. For years—in the eyes of critics, although not of London West End audiences—his elegant stories of the repressed anguish of the privileged classes were no match for the working-class realism of John Osborne and the other angry young dramatists. But we are learning to look again. I have been looking again at another Rattigan play, The Browning Version, first performed in 1948. But the title of the play takes us back to the classical world. Culture Desk: The Plays of Vaclav Havel. Vaclev Havel’s death on December 18th, 2011, deprived the world not only of a superior—which is to say thinking—human being but of a theatre artist whose achievements on the world stage are bound to be eclipsed by his great political strides, though I don’t see how you can separate the two.
Just as his fellow countryman Milan Kundera wrested crystalline and technically innovative prose out his land’s strange, rich, and poisoned air, Havel, with his sad and happy mind peering out from behind his sad and happy face, wrote plays that are as accurate a record of Czech life in the mid- to late-twentieth-century as anything we’ve known. From the first, he was interested not only in the “power of the powerlessness” but in the ways in which power works to shape both the individual and his legacy: the world twists us into unrecognizable shapes that our children, sadly, come to regard as the truth. Photograph: Havel in March, 1968. CTK Photo/Pavel Vacha. Culture Desk: The Best Theatre of the Year. Santa, baby, next year please: can we get Arthur Kopit’s brilliant “Discovery of America” on the boards? Will you deliver—I’ve been asking for years now—a few good sets of lyrics in musical shows which aren’t movie retreads and which carry appropriate intellectual weight?
And no more infernal all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays unless we can have their equal in folly: all-white productions of August Wilson. And, since I’ve been a good boy, could I get more bravery from producers and from playwrights to take the theatre beyond sexual politics to the soiled workings of the public realm? Is more thought, more visual excitement, more joy too much to ask? But, don’t think I’m not grateful for this year, Santa. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. The Best of the Rest: As the demented housebound wife in John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” Edie Falco turned in an unexpected and wrenching comic performance. Illustration by Jim Stoten. Photo Booth: Vince Aletti’s Top 10 Photo Shows. Getting In. There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge.
“Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis.
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Krueger says that there is one exception to this.