Category Archives: Books

BBC’s A Suitable Boy rankles ‘love jihad’ conspiracy theorists in India

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BJP reaction to depiction of Hindu-Muslim romance follows recent rows over interfaith marriages

When the BBC’s adaptation of Vikram’s Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy recently landed on Indian Netflix it did not take long for the fanfare to turn to controversy.

The series, it was claimed by politicians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), had “hurt religious sentiments” of Hindus by depicting the lead character, a Hindu girl called Lata, passionately kissing a Muslim boy against the backdrop of a temple.

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A Promised Land by Barack Obama review – an impressive but incomplete memoir

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Gary Younge on a memoir with vivid detail and captivating pillow talk, but one that leaves out too much to give a clear view of Obama’s first term

“I guess the question for you, Mr President, is: ‘Do you feel lucky?’” In his new autobiography, Barack Obama recalls being asked this by his director of legislative affairs, Phil Schiliro, at a time when his options for passing comprehensive healthcare reform were narrowing.

“I looked at him and smiled. ‘Where are we, Phil?’”
Schiliro paused, assuming a catch. ‘The Oval Office?’
‘And what’s my name?’
‘Barack Obama.’
Obama beamed. ‘Barack Hussein Obama. And I’m here with you in the Oval Office. Brother, I always feel lucky.’

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Two polar bears come sniffing in the Arctic night: Esther Horvath’s best photograph

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‘I heard from the ship that two bears were walking directly towards us. I told the scientists to pack up. When they said no, I showed no mercy’

In the autumn of 2019, I joined an expedition to the Arctic. We set sail from Tromsø, Norway, on 20 September, on the Polarstern icebreaker. There were 100 people on board – 60 scientists and 40 crew – but the ship was big enough that it never felt crowded. There were people you didn’t see for days.

The plan was to find the perfect ice floe to anchor to, then drift for one year through the central Arctic Ocean and the six-month long night of the Arctic winter – about which we have almost no scientific data. The study was the first time that this oceanographic, sea ice, atmospheric, ecosystem and biogeochemistry research had ever been done at this scale. On 4 October, the ship turned off its engine in order to become frozen into the sea ice. That was the last day of daylight. The days got shorter very quickly, and the darkness was intense. Mostly it was overcast. You couldn’t see the stars. You couldn’t hear anyone speak, either, because of the constant wind.

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British Library apologises for linking Ted Hughes to slave trade

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The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence

The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.

Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.

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Strewth, bloody, rooted: is there a quintessentially Australian swear word?

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In this book extract, Amanda Laugesen says it’s hard to argue that Australians swear more than others, but we do our best, and we try to be inventive in the process

Linguist Geoffrey Hughes writes that “people swear by what is most potent to them”.

What is considered to be “most potent” changes across time, although taboo has often focused on the religious (hell), the sexual (fuck), and the excretory (shit). More recently racial, sexist and other discriminatory epithets have become our most taboo and controversial terms.

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Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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Lying, paranoia and conspiracy are defining features of a totalitarian society. What hope is there for a brand new era, in the aftermath of an administration that has relied on all three?

“I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.

The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.

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Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

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In this excerpt from A Promised Land, the former president remembers the anxious run-up to the 2008 election. Scroll down to hear a clip of him reading from it

More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.

And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

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Elena Ferrante names her 40 favourite books by female authors

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List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics

Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend, has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world, with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.

The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.

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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review – Chadwick Boseman glorious in his final film role

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The movie version of August Wilson’s story of the blues, starring Boseman and a tremendous Viola Davis, is a ferocious opera of passion and pain

A detonation of pure acting firepower is what’s on offer in this movie version of August Wilson’s 1982 stage play. Declarative and theatrical it might be, but it’s also ferociously intelligent and violently focused, an opera of passion and pain. We see African-American musicians hanging around a white-owned Chicago studio one stiflingly hot day in the 1920s, waiting for the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey to show up with her entourage so they can cut an album. The lead track is expected to be her live hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the drama imagines a certain pushy trumpeter in the band named Levee angling for his own version to be recorded. A simmering argument about how this song is to be arranged and performed forms the basis of a confrontation about race, sex and power.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with tremendous hauteur: Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I never arrived at Hampton Court with more magnificent display or more queenly prerogative than Davis’s Rainey making her entrance, with her own lovers and court favourites, sweating at the temperature, her painful feet and the incompetence of the studio chiefs. And Chadwick Boseman gives a moving performance as the fiercely talented but insecure Levee, crucified by a childhood experience of racist violence and dreaming of fronting his own band.

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Douglas Stuart wins Booker prize for debut Shuggie Bain

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Scottish-American wins £50,000 for autobiographical novel about a boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, which is ‘destined to be a classic’

The Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the Booker prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, a story based on his own life that follows a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with a mother who is battling addiction.

Stuart, 44, has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late”. He is the second Scot to win the £50,000 award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said “changed his life” because it was the first time he saw “my people, my dialect, on the page”.

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When it comes to a family trauma, who gets to tell the story?

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When Fariha Róisín started writing Like a Bird, she thought the traumatic event at its heart was just a dream. She explores the weight of a family secret

In her 1861 account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs exposed her sexual abuse by her master with lucidity and truth. Yet for more than 100 years, it was accepted academic opinion that Incidents was a novel, written by white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. It was not until the 1980s that critic Jean Fagan Yellin proved Jacobs to be the true author; Incidents had been autobiographical all along.

In Hollywood, rape narratives are largely penned by men and seen as a motif, because the tension (and tragedy) of the experience creates sympathy, compassion; it formalises emotion. When we see a woman raped and abused on film we absolve ourselves for watching, because we want to understand the ugliness of human atrocity, or so that’s what we say. And when women write about rape, often in literature, its seen as melodramatic, overemotional, too impossible to be true. “Primarily, rape is considered a women’s issue, though this is, of course, hardly the case,” writes poet Moniza Alvi, in the introduction to Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives, “and perhaps this is partly why it is considered a literary taboo, particularly when conveyed from a female viewpoint.”

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Obama hails arrival of a more ‘caring government’ as memoir launches – video

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In an interview marking the launch of his memoir A Promised Land, Barack Obama tells Oprah Winfrey that the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will help lead the US back to the 'competent, caring government we so badly need'. 

He lamented the standard of governance over the past four years, saying Biden and Harris will 'level set' and show that the presidency will not label journalists 'enemies of the state' or 'routinely lie'  

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‘Treasure trove’ of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

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Affectionate friendship between the two poets and artist Barrie Cooke, united by a love of fishing, revealed in a collection of correspondence that was believed lost

A “treasure trove” of unseen poems and letters by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke has revealed the depth of a close three-way friendship that one Cambridge academic has described as a “rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group”.

Cooke, who died in 2014, was a leading expressionist artist in Ireland, and a passionate fisherman. Fellow fishing enthusiast Mark Wormald, an English fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, came across his name while reading Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries at the British Library. He visited Cooke in Ireland, and discovered the close friendship between the three men.

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A guided walk of Tolkien’s original Shire, in Birmingham

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It’s there and back again for our writer, who takes in Hobbiton, the mill, the Old Forest and the author’s childhood home – all in the suburb of Sarehole

‘It was kind of a lost paradise,” JRR Tolkien told the Guardian in an interview in 1966. “There was an old mill that really did grind corn, with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill.”

Four miles south of central Birmingham in the Hall Green area lies the inspiration for Tolkien’s Shire – the former hamlet of Sarehole. Tolkien lived here from 1896, between the ages of four and eight. “I loved it [Sarehole] with an intense love,” he said. “I took the idea of the Hobbits from the village people and children.”

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British woman accusing senior UAE royal of sexual assault to fight on

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Caitlin McNamara says she will appeal the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision not to pursue Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan for the alleged attack in Abu Dhabi

The British woman who accused a United Arab Emirates senior royal of sexually assaulting her has vowed to fight on after the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute him last month, saying that the CPS decision sends “a clear message to this man and those committing similar crimes that as long as they’re of economic value to the UK, they can do whatever they want”.

Caitlin McNamara, who was the curator of the first Hay festival in Abu Dhabi in February, went public with her accusations last month. She alleges that Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, the UAE’s minister of tolerance, had attacked her shortly before the festival, which his department had funded. McNamara had believed she would be attending a business meeting with the royal, who denies the allegations through a London lawyer: “Our client is surprised and saddened by this allegation, which arrives eight months after the alleged incident and via a national newspaper. The account is denied.”

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‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius

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She went platinum by plugging Bach into 20th-century machines, and was soon working with Stanley Kubrick. But prejudice around her gender transition pushed Wendy Carlos out of sight

This summer, an 80-year-old synthesiser pioneer suddenly appeared online. She had been silent for 11 years, but now something had appeared that she just wouldn’t tolerate. “Please be aware there’s a purported ‘biography’ on me just released,” wrote Wendy Carlos on the homepage of her 16-bit-friendly website, a Siamese cat and a synthesiser behind her portrait. “No one ever interviewed me [for it], nor anyone I know,” she went on. “Aren’t there new, more interesting targets?”

Given that Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music, it’s remarkable that Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos: A Biography is the first book about her. This is the musician who pushed Robert Moog to perfect his first analogue synthesiser, from which pop, prog, electronica and film music flourished. Her smash-hit 1968 album Switched-On Bach made the Moog internationally famous and became the second classical album ever to go platinum in the US. Then came her extraordinary soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. She made an ambient album five years before Brian Eno did, and jumped from analogue machines to do leading work in digital synthesis, but worried that her status as one of the first visible transgender artists in the US would overshadow it.

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Rare stolen books, including works by Newton and Galileo, returned to owners

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Books worth more than £2.5m found in Romania after Mission Impossible-style theft

Hundreds of internationally important and irreplaceable books worth more than £2.5m that were stolen in a daring heist by abseiling burglars have been returned to their rightful owners.

Metropolitan police announced the successful conclusion on Tuesday of a near four-year police operation investigating the Mission Impossible-style theft of books that included rare works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo and the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.

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Stacey Abrams: Georgia’s political heroine … and romance author

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Writing under the name Selena Montgomery, Abrams has penned eight romantic thrillers, often while also fighting for voters’ rights

Stacey Abrams is the former Georgia state house minority leader, whose fierce fight for Georgians’ right to vote has been credited for potentially handing the state to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years. But Abrams has another identity: the novelist Selena Montgomery, a romance and thriller writer who has sold more than 100,000 copies of her eight novels.

Abrams wrote her first novel during her third year at Yale Law School, inspired after reading her ex-boyfriend’s PhD dissertation in chemical physics. She had wanted to write a spy novel: “For me, for other young black girls, I wanted to write books that showed them to be as adventurous and attractive as any white woman,” she wrote in her memoir Minority Leader. But after being told repeatedly by editors that women don’t read spy novels, and that men don’t read spy novels by women, she made her spies fall in love. Rules of Engagement, her debut, was published in 2001, and sees temperatures flare as covert operative Raleigh partners with the handsome Adam Grayson to infiltrate a terrorist group that has stolen deadly environmental technology.

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Stanley Kubrick and Kirk Douglas wanted Doctor Zhivago movie rights

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Director wrote to Boris Pasternak in late 1950s, previously unpublished material reveals

It is one of the greatest British films of all time, directed in 1965 by David Lean with an A-list cast that included Julie Christie, Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. But the epic adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s classic love story set against the Russian revolution, might never have happened if a planned US production had got there first.

James Fenwick, a British film historian, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – had tried in vain to acquire the movie rights earlier, in the late 1950s.

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