Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United World Schools, which has opened schools in the country.
All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS
*All girls’ names have been changed
Continue reading...As key states started to slip away from Trump, Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged former president to lie, according to new book
A drunken Rudy Giuliani repeatedly urged Donald Trump to “just say we won” on election night last November, according to a new book, even as key states started to slip away from the president and defeat by Joe Biden drew near.
Related: Landslide review: Michael Wolff’s third Trump book is his best – and most alarming
Continue reading...His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiancé, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes
At the centre of Kurt Tong’s elaborate visual narrative Dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story that is also a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from poor beginnings to become part of Hong Kong’s social elite in the 1940s, and a young woman known only as Dongyu, the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese general.
They met, fell in love, but shortly after their engagement, Dongyu was one of several thousand refugees fleeing the Chinese communist army on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old Japanese sea mine. “Their love story should have ended with this terrible tragedy,” says Tong, “but it continued after her death because Franklin agreed to a ‘ghost marriage’, an elaborate traditional ceremony in which he became eternally wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world.”
Continue reading...Having long encouraged universities to find funding elsewhere, politicians now home in on their ties to China to argue that they’ve lost their way
Outside the political sphere, much of Australia’s China panic centres on university campuses. This is hardly surprising, given the deep connections of the Australian higher-education sector to China.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, higher education brought in some A$12bn in export revenue, most of it from China. With more than 150,000 Chinese international students enrolled, some institutions relied on that single revenue stream to make up a quarter of their total budget before the current drop-off. Mandarin is the second language of campus life in most universities these days; Confucius Institutes have been established at 13 universities; partnerships and MOUs with Chinese universities proliferate in many fields. Australian academics now collaborate more with colleagues in China than in any other foreign country: one report found that an incredible 16.2% of scientific papers by Australian researchers – almost one in six – were co-authored with researchers in China, with papers in the fields of materials science, chemical engineering and energy topping the list.
Continue reading...Former Children of God member says simple question put to her by Walter Schwarz was life-changing
It was a simple question to a child, one routinely asked by adults: what do you want to be when you grow up? But for 11-year-old Bexy Cameron, who had never known anything but the strict religious cult she was born into, it was life-changing.
Her brief encounter with the Guardian journalist Walter Schwarz in the 1990s led to her escaping the Children of God cult at the age of 15, leaving behind her parents and siblings. Now she has written a memoir, Cult Following, about growing up in a movement founded by a controlling sexual predator. The last line of her acknowledgments reads: “Eternal gratitude to Walter Schwarz (RIP). Who knows what would have happened without that ‘one simple question’?”
Continue reading...Emmanuel Carrère’s drama – based on Florence Aubenas’s bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham – fails to probe fully the injustices faced by low-paid workers
Novelist and film-maker Emmanuel Carrère has contrived this earnestly intentioned but naive and supercilious drama about poverty and the gig economy, starring a tearful Juliette Binoche. It is adapted from the French non-fiction bestseller Le Quai de Ouistreham from 2010 by investigative journalist Florence Aubenas, published in the UK under the title The Night Cleaner.
In it, Aubenas describes her experiences “going undercover” and working in the brutal world of cleaning in Caen in northern France, where desperate applicants have to burnish their CVs with fatuous assurances about how passionate they are about cleaning, in return for dehumanising work with pitiful pay, grisly conditions and no job security. The grimmest part of the work is scrubbing lavatories and cleaning cabins on the ferry between Ouistreham and Portsmouth. The book is in the undercover tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain.
Perhaps what might have been valuable would have been a documentary fronted by Aubenas herself, about what has and hasn’t been achieved for gig workers in France since her book came out – or, arguably, a Loachian fiction based on the real lives of these workers. What Carrère has done is create a drama in which it is the fictionalised Aubenas who is the centre of an imagined gallery of toughly courageous workers – her new best friends. The real dramatic crisis comes with Aubenas’s awful dilemma when she has to confess to them she has been fibbing all this time, and using their lives as raw material for her book, which she will write as soon as she returns to her wealthy and fashionable life in Paris. Some of her soon-to-be-jettisoned pals will forgive her when they see how important her book is. Some may not.
Direct your energy into your creativity and do what you want to do
The question I am a nearly 40-year-old woman and I’ve recently realised that I have no idea what would make me happy. I’m married with children and a good career. We’re financially comfortable. I have nothing to complain about. Yet beneath the surface, I feel a sort of numb despair at life. I find no joy in anything. I dislike my job and feel disconnected from my family. I sleep poorly, which doesn’t help; sometimes at night I get so angry with myself for not being able to achieve this basic human function that I wish I would just die.
The one thing I’ve always wanted in life is to be a writer. I’ve had three books brought out by a large publisher, but they were unsuccessful. So, although people say I should be proud, I see myself as a failure. I keep telling myself not to give up, but increasingly it’s hard to find a reason to keep trying. I just cling to my old dream out of habit, and because it’s a vanishing spark of hope in an otherwise grey landscape.
Continue reading...Handbags, lap dancing, Botox, comfort food … the columnist recalls how she only had five months to write the feminist bestseller about everything
It was 2010, the end of a decade that was astonishingly poisonous for women. All the visuals were brutal: Amy Winehouse, bleeding, being chased by paps; Britney Spears’s loss of virginity and her breakdown, being chatshow jokes; the “Charlotte Church Countdown Clock” to her 16th birthday, when she would become legally fuckable.
I rang my editor at the Times, and said I wanted to do a thinkpiece on how, in this current awful climate, one could try to be a modern feminist. Was there a way feminism could become popular again? “I’m not feminist, but …” was a common catchphrase, back then, when women tried to talk about inequality, but didn’t want to get dirty feminism all over their shoes.
Continue reading...A collection of wickedly funny, rousing polemics takes aim at ecotourism, the beauty industry … and crime fiction
In 1938, three years before her suicide at 59, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, a long-form essay on patriarchy and its seemingly inevitable trajectory, war – a forceful indictment of the fascism that was then sweeping Europe and beyond. Her most conspicuously pacifist work, Three Guineas was contentious for its time. It argued that subjugation of women in the domestic sphere (notably, Woolf refers to “the daughters of educated men”, women of her own privileged class) is reflected in an equal lack of representation in the public domain of education and influence: “The public and private worlds are inseparably connected ... the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other,” she wrote. As part of a solution, Woolf proposed supporting three causes with a guinea each: specifically, a society to avert war, a campaign for the rebuilding of a women’s college and an organisation to encourage women’s professional employment. Always elegant, Three Guineas nevertheless throbs with justifiable anger and fear. Its rallying cry and the recognition that the personal is also political would go on to, for example, inspire female peace activists of the 1960s, who took various of its sentences as antiwar slogans. “Set fire to the old hypocrisies,” urges Woolf. Unsurprisingly, its central themes have not dated.
Ellmann is hellbent on upbraiding the deleterious forces of the prevailing misogyny
Continue reading...After fleeing persecution in Myanmar, Ealom was detained in a ‘torture camp’. Using tricks learned from Prison Break, he snuck his way out
In 2013, when Jaivet Ealom sat squeezed in a boat with other asylum seekers, he prayed, not for the first time, for an easy death. They were far from shore off the coast of Indonesia, the vessel was sinking, and Ealom could not swim.
Fishermen from a nearby island came to the rescue, hauling each passenger from the half-submerged vessel. Ealom was saved. But during the chaos, a small baby fell into the ocean. “It never resurfaced,” remembers Ealom. “[The mother] just screamed from the bottom of her lungs. It was traumatising.”
Continue reading...Mark Meadows reportedly said ‘We can’t organize that’ after Trump told supporters he’d march, according to Landslide
Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.
Related: Top US general got into shouting match with Trump over race protests – report
Continue reading...That 10% fee buys a novelist like me more than the chance of a big book deal – from a hand with the DIY to a shoulder to cry on after yet another knockback
A few weeks after the sudden death of my agent, Deborah Rogers, in 2014 the colleague deputed to take me on phoned. “I’ve found something in Deborah’s desk.”
“Yes?”
Continue reading...Twenty-five years after Sapphire’s novel Push was published, Tayari Jones salutes its groundbreaking heroine, Precious
In the Reagan years, I was a teenager, more reader than writer, when I discovered the work of Sapphire. As a college student, I hung out with a cluster of intense, arty types, sharing battered copies of chapbooks, zines and small-press volumes. My good friend Angela passed me a sheaf of xeroxed pages by an author who called herself Sapphire. What I remember most clearly was a poem from the point of view of Celestine Tate Harrington, the quadriplegic boardwalk singer who fought the city for custody of her child. The poem was defiant as the speaker focused less on the joys of motherhood and more on ownership of her sexuality. Angela speculated that Sapphire would likely never receive her due in the world of letters, because she had chosen as her subject the people whose bodies are stigmatised, whose families are pathologised, and whose very lives are held up as everything America rejects. “She is a hero,” Angela declared, and I nodded in solemn agreement.
Some critics were appalled by the very idea of this story being held up as an important work of literature
Continue reading...Young TikTok users are sharing their passion for books with millions – bringing titles they love to life online and reshaping the publishing world, all in under a minute
In August 2020, Kate Wilson, a 16-year-old from Shrewsbury, posted on the social media video platform TikTok a series of quotes from books she had read, “that say I love you, without actually saying I love you”. Set to a melancholy soundtrack, the short video plays out as Wilson, an A-level student, holds up copies of the books with the quotes superimposed over them. “You have been the last dream of my soul,” from A Tale of Two Cities. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” from Wuthering Heights. “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own,” from Jane Eyre. It has been viewed more than 1.2m times.
Wilson’s TikTok handle, @kateslibrary, is among the increasingly popular accounts posting on #BookTok, a corner of TikTok devoted to reading, which has clocked up 9.6bn views and counting, and has been described as the last wholesome place on the internet. Here, users – predominantly young women – post short videos inspired by the books they love. Those that do best are fun, snappy takes on literature and the experience of reading. “Books where the main character was sent to kill someone but they end up falling in love,” from @kateslibrary. “Things that bookworms do,” from @abbysbooks. “When you were 12 and your parents caught you crying over a book,” from @emilymiahreads.
Continue reading...Ghostwriter Barry Coleman says he was given two ‘awful’ weeks to finish an entire book with the Rolling Stone – then the singer pulled the plug in case it was too dull
Barry Coleman still remembers the day in 1983 when he was called by his editor at the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson and told: “We’ve got a problem. Can you come in … tomorrow?”
“The urgency was a bit disorienting,” he recalls. “Something had clearly gone horribly wrong.”
Continue reading...Donald Trump wanted Covid-19 to “take out” his former national security adviser John Bolton, a new book is set to reveal, as a heated summer of further colourful revelations about the controversial former president spills out from competing tomes.
The forthcoming Nightmare Scenario will stake out the claim, in addition to telling of how Trump advocated shipping Americans who contracted coronavirus while abroad to the prison at Guantánamo Bay.
Continue reading...In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump advocated shipping Americans who contracted Covid-19 abroad to Guantánamo Bay.
Related: Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is key source for media he ‘hates’, columnist says
Continue reading...Elisabeth Moss has always made this impressive if horrifying TV. But as the new series turns June into queen of the rebels, it has a shot of new life
I am not sure if “enjoyment” is quite the right word in relation to watching The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). It has been, at various points over the last three seasons, either a harrowing slog or an extremely harrowing slog. But at its best, it is impressive, inventive drama that pushes unfamiliar buttons with great skill. It had a magnificent, haunting first season, which largely stuck to the plot of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, but afterwards it struggled under the weight of its own misery. June (Elisabeth Moss) escaped from Gilead, and was captured, ad infinitum, which made it feel like a gruesome hall of mirrors in which hope was pointless. It made me wonder whether continuing to watch was pointless, too. But a diversion into global politics gave it a shot of new life, and season four continues to explore new ground. It needed it, and it works.
The lengthy recap at the beginning is useful, given that the pandemic delayed production. According to its showrunner, Bruce Miller, the logistics of shooting in Canada also had a direct effect on shaping the story. June organised a cohort of rebels, pulling together an underground network of Marthas and Handmaids, to smuggle 86 children out of Gilead, saving them from life under a brutal regime. The Waterfords have been arrested by the Canadian government and are in captivity, but at the end of season three, it looked as though June may have run out of luck. Still, without her, this is Handmaids’ Tales, rather than The Handmaid’s Tale. If the question is, how much more can one woman endure, then the answer comes quickly: using no anaesthetic, Janine cauterises the shotgun wound in June’s abdomen with a red-hot poker. Welcome to season four.
Continue reading...Far-right conspiracies ran unchecked online in the Trump years. It’s all gone quiet since the Capitol riot, but author Mike Rothschild believes there’s a radicalised audience waiting for a new rallying point
On 7 January this year, a day after the mob stormed the Capitol in Washington DC, a curious exchange occurred in the netherworld of global conspiracy. Alex Jones, the rasp-voiced mouthpiece of fake news for the past decade, was in conversation with the most visible leader of the previous day’s shocking events: Jacob Chansley, the self-styled “Q Shaman” who featured on the world’s front pages, in buffalo horns, animal skins and face paint.
Jones, on his fake-news platform Infowars, with its million-plus viewers and sharers, had for years been the loudhailer of unhinged stories that included the belief that Hillary Clinton was the antichrist, that Michelle Obama was a man, that the Pentagon and George Soros had detonated a “homosexual bomb” that turned even frogs gay, that 9/11 had been a “false flag” operation and, most viciously, that the Sandy Hook school murders, in which 20 children and six teachers died, were staged by “crisis actors” to promote gun control. Jones had inevitably been among those who addressed the restive crowd at Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” march (having donated $50,000 for the staging of the rally) and calling for supporters to “get on a war footing” to defend the president. Two days later, however, when faced with the rhetoric of Chansley, whom he had invited on to his show to explain the insurrection, it seemed even he, America’s conspirator in chief, finally couldn’t take the lies any more.
Continue reading...Enduring myths lead to an undue anguish and reluctance to seek help for dementia. If you’re aware of them, prevention and delay are possible
A fear of dementia looms large in the minds of many, and understandably so. It is a condition with potentially devastating effects – incurable, progressive and which threatens to rob us of the essence of who we are. It is also a condition surrounded by unhelpful myths, however, and our bleak view is often unjustified. Prevention or delay are possible, and much can be done to help even if dementia develops.
The first myth is that memory loss is an inevitable part of dementia. This is not the case and may lead to under-recognition of the condition. Memory loss is the archetypal symptom of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease – the most common cause of dementia – but dementia can be due to numerous disease processes and these may lead to other symptoms. As an example, frontotemporal dementia may present first with changes in personality and behaviour, or with language problems. Vascular dementia symptoms vary according to which part of the brain has compromised blood supply. Any change in cognitive function – not just memory, but language, social cognition, visuospatial abilities and the like – should prompt you to seek medical advice.
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