Category Archives: Books

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was about liberalism, not totalitarianism, claims Moscow diplomat

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Maria Zakharova says idea book is about totalitarianism is ‘one of the biggest global fakes’, in claim disputed by Russian translator

George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four was written to describe the dangers of western liberalism – not totalitarianism - a top Moscow diplomat has claimed.

“For many years we believed that Orwell described the horrors of totalitarianism. This is one of the biggest global fakes … Orwell wrote about the end of liberalism. He depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end,” Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for Russia’s foreign ministry, said during a public talk in Ekaterinburg on Saturday.

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Author Mario Vargas Llosa backs Bolsonaro over Lula in Brazil election

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Peruvian writer criticises incumbent’s ‘clowning around’ but says he is still preferable to former president

The Nobel prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa, Latin America’s most eminent living chronicler of power and corruption, has declared a preference for Jair Bolsonaro over Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as Brazil prepares to head to the polls later this year.

The 86-year-old Peruvian writer, who also holds Spanish citizenship, revealed his thoughts on October’s election during a talk in Uruguay on Wednesday.

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Whiti Hereaka wins New Zealand’s Ockham fiction prize for novel subverting Māori myth

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Kurangaituku, 'an epic poem of a novel’, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn prize at a ceremony that delivered ‘loads of surprises’

A novel subverting a Māori myth has taken home New Zealand’s most prestigious writing prize at this year’s Ockham New Zealand book awards.

Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka, which draws on the Māori legend of Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman but tells it from the perspective of the tale’s traditional monster Kurangaituku, has won the $60,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction.

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Writer’s essay on why she plagiarized her book removed for … plagiarism

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Jumi Bello’s essay was briefly published on the Literary Hub website until it was revealed she had again lifted material

An author’s online essay on why she used plagiarized material in a novel pulled earlier this year has itself been removed after editors found she had again lifted material.

Jumi Bello’s essay, I Plagiarized Parts of My Debut Novel. Here’s Why appeared just briefly Monday on the website Literary Hub. Bello’s debut novel, The Leaving had been scheduled to come out in July, but was cancelled in February by Riverhead Books.

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Washington Post wins public service Pulitzer for Capitol attack coverage

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Paper beat out two other finalists, the New York Times and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Washington Post has won the 2022 Pulitzer prize for public service journalism, for The Attack, its account of the deadly assault on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January 2021.

The paper beat two other finalists: the New York Times, for challenging official accounts of US military engagements in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, for an exposé of electrical fires in city rental operations.

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Tortured to death: the 14 Cypriot men killed by British in 50s uprising

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Book reveals fate of EOKA guerrilla fighters at the hands of the army during the dying days of empire on the Mediterranean island

At least 14 Cypriots were tortured then murdered by UK forces during an armed uprising in the late 1950s, according to newly unearthed evidence that raises fresh questions over another shocking chapter of Britain’s colonial history.

Testimony from British veterans and Cypriot rebel fighters, along with postmortem and morgue records, as well as previously undisclosed material from Cypriot archives, suggest that the victims died after being interrogated by UK officers. The dead, all men aged between 17 and 37, were arrested on suspicion of being part of the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters, a paramilitary organisation known as EOKA, which orchestrated a guerrilla campaign to overthrow British control in Cyprus.

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Trump sought strike on top Iran military figure for political reasons – Esper book

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Robert O’Brien told top general shortly before 2020 election that Trump wanted to kill unnamed official, according to Esper memoir

Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, “stunned” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff by saying the president wanted to kill a senior Iranian military officer operating outside the Islamic Republic.

“This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Mark Esper, Trump’s second and last secretary of defense, writes in his new memoir, adding that Gen Mark Milley suspected O’Brien saw the strike purely in terms of Trump’s political interests.

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Rare ‘Wicked’ bible that encourages adultery discovered in New Zealand

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First copy of the 1631 bible, which mistakenly reads ‘thou shalt commit adultery’, to be found in the southern hemisphere

An extremely rare bible famous for an unfortunate error that encourages adultery has been discovered in New Zealand.

The 1631 “Wicked” Bible, as it has become known, omits the word “not” from its seventh commandment, informing readers “thou shalt commit adultery”. One thousand copies of the text, which also came to be known as the Adulterous or Sinners’ Bible, were printed, with the error only discovered a year later.

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Ian Fleming’s lost James Bond screenplay reveals a very different 007

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With no Moneypenny and no M, a previously unpublished script reveals the author’s original ideas for Moonraker

In the action-packed film Moonraker, James Bond escapes from Jaws, the metal-toothed villain, on a hang-glider that ejects from a speedboat just as he drives over the precipice of a waterfall. It is one of numerous outlandish scenes in the film that Ian Fleming never wrote in his original 007 novel. And it could not be more different to the author’s own version of the film, according to a previously unpublished script.

In 1956, a year after the Moonraker novel was published, Fleming wrote his own 150-page film treatment with a plot that is as serious as the 1979 film is lightweight, despite Roger Moore’s charm as the fictional spy.

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Barcelona honours Gabriel García Márquez with new library

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The Colombian Nobel laureate, who lived in the city from 1967-75, is to have a €12m building specialising in Latin American literature named after him

In the digital age, building a new library filled with old-fashioned printed books seems idealistic, almost quixotic.Not so in Barcelona. The city council is about to open a new €12m (£10m) library next month, the latest instalment in a programme that dates back 20 years.

The library, in the working-class district of Sant Martí de Provençals, has been named in honour of the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

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Gay references removed from Fantastic Beasts 3 for Chinese release

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Big-budget fantasy sequel has had six seconds cut, as Warner Bros releases statement to say ‘the spirit of the film remains intact’

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has been edited for release in China to ensure any gay references have been removed.

The fantasy sequel, which has an estimated budget of $200m, contains allusions to a romantic history between the characters of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, played by Jude Law and Mads Mikkelsen respectively. Six seconds of dialogue, including the lines “Because I was in love with you” and “The summer Gellert and I fell in love”, were taken out for the Chinese release on 8 April.

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Martha Wainwright: ‘Forget rock excess, life on the road was a juggling act for me’

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The Canadian-American singer-songwriter on why she needed to tell a different story in her candid autobiography

The rock autobiography is typically a male genre, telling tales of excess so competitive that readers could be forgiven for wishing Keith Richards, Neil Young, Roger Daltrey, et al, would break the monotony by taking up wood whittling.

But now comes Martha Wainwright, whose autobiography, published this week, is a female-gaze account of what it takes to juggle relationships, familial and domestic circumstances with life under the stage lights.

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Anne Frank: Dutch publisher recalls book on diarist’s betrayal after critical report

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The book named a Jewish notary as a main suspect in exposing the family’s hideout to the Nazis, prompting widespread backlash

The Dutch publisher of a discredited cold case investigation into the betrayal of teenage Jewish diarist Anne Frank said it was recalling the book following a critical report on its findings.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Canadian bestselling author Rosemary Sullivan has been widely criticised by experts since its release in January.

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Booker winner Ben Okri rewrites published novel to drive home message on slavery

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The author tells why he spent five years on a new draft of his 2008 novel Starbook to give more emphasis to one of its key themes

Self-criticism, perhaps even regret, is common among writers looking back at old work, but the novelist Ben Okri has now gone so far as to rewrite a whole published novel. And it is a book he already liked quite a lot.

The Booker-prize-winning Nigerian author has spent much of the last five years re-crafting his 2008 story Starbook, a mystical romance set in his homeland. A new version, complete with a new title and cover, is to be published this summer as The Last Gift of the Master Artists, and Okri believes that he has given more emphasis to transatlantic slavery, and will now offer his readers a “more considered” narrative.

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‘Nothing was stolen’: New Zealanders carry on borrowing from closed, unstaffed library

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Door security error meant one of country’s largest city libraries was left open for hours, allowing hundreds to browse shelves

As New Zealand celebrated a national holiday, one of the country’s largest city libraries was closed, with staff and security given the day off. But an error with the automated door programming meant Tūranga’s doors opened to the public as usual – and the unstaffed and unsecured library was happily used by the public, who browsed and checked out books for hours before someone realised the mistake.

As well as its books, the library is home to a wide variety of artworks and sculpture – but staff say nothing was stolen, and there were no serious incidents to report.

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How Dickens’ Pickwick comic serial brought his fans together

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Museum exhibit reveals the huge effect the The Pickwick Papers had on readers

Charles Dickens’s comic novel The Pickwick Papers, often overlooked today as a lighthearted period piece, was once a matter of very serious concern to thousands of fans across the world, some of whom adopted the personas of their favourite characters and founded appreciation societies.

Now the earliest proof that Mr Pickwick became central to the lives of many fans is to go on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in the novelist’s former London home in April. The Minute Book contains the official club notes of the first known Pickwick club and gives a clear picture of the way the book brought friends together to discuss the plots and debate social issues of the day.

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Museum visits do not improve GCSE results, study reveals

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Report finds no correlation between better exam grades and exposure to ‘middle-class’ outings

A family trip to the theatre or an afternoon at a museum may be a fun day out, but new research suggests that such cultural outings will not actually help children secure higher grades.

There have been persistent theories that wealthier children may be given an advantage in their school careers by being pressed into visits to art galleries and exhibitions. According to a new academic study, however, outings often regarded as “middle class” had no correlation with improved GCSE results.

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Hoard of the rings: ‘lost’ scripts for BBC Tolkien drama discovered

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Original manuscripts show how author rewrote scenes for 1950s adaptation of his Middle-earth epic Lord of the Rings

Decades before Peter Jackson directed his epic adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien was involved with the first ever dramatisation of his trilogy, but its significance was not realised in the 1950s and the BBC’s audio recordings are believed to have been destroyed.

Now an Oxford academic has delved into the BBC archives and discovered the original scripts for the two series of 12 radio episodes broadcast in 1955 and 1956, to the excitement of fellow scholars.

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Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017, ex-ambassador says in book

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Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019, reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian counterpart

At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.

Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”

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