The actor has claimed that his famous role in Pride and Prejudice 25 years ago left him typecast and narrowed his acting horizons
Name: Mr Darcy.
Age: 207, 28, 35, 25, depending on how you look at it, really.
Continue reading...Category Archives: Books
Per Olov Enquist, celebrated Swedish author, dies aged 85
Much garlanded novelist, playwright, poet and Oscar-winning screenwriter hailed as ‘a giant among European writers’
Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, described as “a giant among European writers” by his publisher, has died at the age of 85.
The author’s family told Swedish media that he died on Saturday night after a long illness. The much-celebrated novelist, playwright and poet, known by his initials PO, was winner of the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize. His historical novel The Visit of the Royal Physician – set in the adulterous, backstabbing world of the 18th-century Danish courts, where the mad king Christian VII’s queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, falls in love with the court physician – won him the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. It also made him the only Swedish author to take the Independent foreign fiction prize, the precursor to the International Booker, in 2001.
Continue reading...Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Will coronavirus change our attitudes to death? Quite the opposite’
Will the coronavirus pandemic return us to more traditional and accepting, attitudes towards dying – or reinforce our attempts to prolong life?
The modern world has been shaped by the belief that humans can outsmart and defeat death. That was a revolutionary new attitude. For most of history, humans meekly submitted to death. Up to the late modern age, most religions and ideologies saw death not only as our inevitable fate, but as the main source of meaning in life. The most important events of human existence happened after you exhaled your last breath. Only then did you come to learn the true secrets of life. Only then did you gain eternal salvation, or suffer everlasting damnation. In a world without death – and therefore without heaven, hell or reincarnation – religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism would have made no sense. For most of history the best human minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to defeat it.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Vedas, and countless other sacred books and tales patiently explained to distressed humans that we die because God decreed it, or the Cosmos, or Mother Nature, and we had better accept that destiny with humility and grace. Perhaps someday God would abolish death through a grand metaphysical gesture such as Christ’s second coming. But orchestrating such cataclysms was clearly above the pay grade of flesh-and-blood humans.
Continue reading...What the butler saw: sex secrets of French presidents’ palace revealed
For 300 hundred years staff at the Elysée witnessed men flaunting their power over women, but no longer, says author of a new book
From the time of kings and emperors to modern day presidents, the Elysée Palace has stood as a symbol of male dominance in society and politics. Behind the wrought iron gates its gilded salons have witnessed conquests of many kinds – including, frequently, the sexual.
Continue reading...On the trail of a Nazi war criminal: ‘It’s my duty as a son to find the good in my father’
East West Street author Philippe Sands uncovers secrets and lies on the trail of Otto Wächter, his devoted wife – and the son brought up to believe his father was a decent man
In the 1960s, my brother and I often visited our grandparents in Paris, near the Gare du Nord. As children, we understood that the past was painful, that we should not ask questions. Their apartment was a place of silences, one haunted by secrets. They only really began to be addressed when I was in my 50s, the consequence of an invitation to deliver a lecture in Lviv, in Ukraine. Come talk about your work on crimes against humanity and genocide, it said.
Continue reading...Every Drop of Blood review: how Lincoln’s Second Inaugural bound America’s wounds
Edward Achorn delivers a fascinating account of an address which entered the national consciousness
As Abraham Lincoln prepared to take the oath of office for a second time, on 4 March 1865, the nation waited to hear what he would say about its future. Triumphalism at military success? A call to further sacrifice? Vengeance on the rebel South or an outline for reconstruction?
Related: 'What it means to be an American': Abraham Lincoln and a nation divided
Continue reading...Chilean author, campaigner and escapee Luis Sepúlveda dies aged 70 of Covid-19
Dramatic career took in escapes from Pinochet’s regime in the 70s, sailing with Greenpeace and writing books including The Old Man Who Read Love Stories
The celebrated Chilean author Luis Sepúlveda, who was exiled by the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s, has died from Covid-19.
Best known for his 1992 novel The Old Man Who Read Love Stories and 1996’s The Story of a Seagull and The Cat Who Taught Her To Fly, Sepúlveda died in hospital on Thursday. He first began showing symptoms from coronavirus on 25 February, after returning to his home in Spain from a festival in Portugal. On 1 March, it was confirmed that Sepúlveda was the first case of Covid-19 in the Asturias region, where he had lived for 20 years.
Continue reading...Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future
As the travel publisher closes its Melbourne and London offices, a former guidebook writer asks what’s next for an industry in crisis
Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. However, the famous guidebooks will continue to be published, though they are temporarily on hold.
As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.
Continue reading...Poem constructed from emails received during quarantine goes viral
Jessica Salfia’s widely shared poem First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining has the refrain ‘As you know, many people are struggling’
Everyone has received at least one and now they’ve been elevated to poetry: a US teacher has highlighted corporate opportunism during the coronavirus outbreak, in a viral poem titled First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining.
Jessica Salfia, an English teacher and writer in West Virginia, posted the poem on Twitter on Saturday. “In these uncertain times / as we navigate the new normal, / Are you willing to share your ideas and solutions? / As you know, many people are struggling,” the poem begins.
Continue reading...Putin’s People by Catherine Belton review – relentless and convincing
This is the most remarkable account so far of Putin’s rise from a KGB operative to deadly agent provocateur in the hated west
In 1985, a young KGB officer arrived in provincial East Germany. His name was Vladimir Putin. What exactly Putin got up to in Dresden is a mystery. The official version says not much: he drank beer, put on weight, lived in an ordinary apartment with his wife, Lyudmila, and their two daughters. While other Soviet spies were having adventures, Putin – so the story goes – sat out the late cold war in a paper-shuffling backwater.
The investigative journalist and former Financial Times reporter Catherine Belton has dug deeper. Her groundbreaking book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West, offers a far more terrifying version. Putin was a senior liaison officer with the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, she suggests. And Dresden was a key base for KGB operations, including murderous ones, in which Putin allegedly played a direct part.
Continue reading...Ann Patchett on running a bookshop in lockdown: ‘We’re a part of our community as never before’
The novelist reveals how the store she co-owns in Nashville is making, and remaking, plans to get books to readers who want them more than ever
We closed Parnassus Books, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, on the same day all the stores around us closed. I can’t tell you when that was because I no longer have a relationship with my calendar.
All the days are now officially the same. My business partner Karen and I talked to the staff and told them if they didn’t feel comfortable coming in that was fine. We would continue to pay them for as long as we could. But if they were OK to work in an empty bookstore, we were going to try to keep shipping books.
Continue reading...Australia’s arts have been hardest hit by coronavirus. So why aren’t they getting support? | Esther Anatolitis
The majority of arts companies and casuals will get little benefit from the jobkeeper package
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- Coronavirus Australia maps and cases: live numbers and statistics
Data released this week proves what the arts and recreation industry already knows: we are by far the industry hardest hit by Covid-19’s economic destruction.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 47% of arts and recreation businesses remain trading. And that number is falling.
Continue reading...As coronavirus keeps us apart, we will let the animals in. I hope we do them justice
In the age of Covid-19 we are taking comfort from animals and wildlife – but we should learn from them too
First, the eyes. I pressed mine to the opening of a little wooden house. The park ranger behind me cleared her throat.
“Yeah, watch out because they jum–”
Continue reading...Our new normal: why so many of us feel unprepared for lockdown life
In his former job as a war correspondent, novelist James Meek witnessed the thin line between everyday life and chaos - but no experience prepared him for our current emergency
Before the lockdown, I went to see a friend who lives a few miles away in south London. I cycled from Nunhead to her home in Blackheath. On the way I passed a tense crowd of people being forced to wait to get into the Iceland store in New Cross. I reached my friend’s block of flats, climbed the stairs to her front door and laid my satchel on the doormat. She opened the door, greeted me from a distance of a couple of yards, removed the groceries she’d asked me to bring, some salmon and a bottle of olive oil, and put them away. We chatted for about half an hour, me sitting on a step out in the hall, her standing in the doorway, neither of us getting closer than two yards. Her husband, whose mild cough a couple of days earlier had triggered her self-isolation, was a disembodied voice offstage. My friend and I always kiss hello and goodbye; we’ve known each other for 10 years. Not this time. I went back to Nunhead, to queue for more food for my family – the butcher, the fishmonger and the greengrocer all had queues outside – then went home and washed my hands.
It’s the small necessary tasks that get you through the abnormality: the assignments, the missions, the good deeds. They break down the fearfulness and strangeness of the greater emergency into smaller, more manageable chunks of personal time where we can see what we have to do and see, just as importantly, that we can actually do it. The more we have to confront the enormity of the changes around us, and our own individual powerlessness to alter the tide of events, the more likely we are to break down or be paralysed. The merciful paradox of crises like these is to bring so many new chores and duties that the difficulties – sometimes the novelties – of solving each step helps occupy the part of our brain that yearns to know what’s going on and do something about it.
Continue reading...Norway’s hazmat booksellers: keeping Oslo reading during coronavirus – video
Two Oslo bookshop owners choose to go delivery-only to keep their business afloat at the start of lockdown. Pil Cappelen Smith and Anders Cappelen deliver books wearing full hazmat suits and gas masks in order to raise local awareness of the seriousness of the situation. But as the global crisis worsens, they embark on one last delivery run before deciding to shut up shop completely
Continue reading...Eldred Jones obituary
My mentor and friend Eldred Jones, who has died aged 95, was principal and pro-vice-chancellor of Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the oldest university institution in sub-Saharan Africa. A literary scholar and critic, he was one of the pioneers of the study of modern African literature and introduced unique perspectives in Shakespearean studies.
Eldred was an outstanding lecturer and his students learned how to think about literature by emulating his example. His 1965 book, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama, won the criticism prize in the first World Festival of Negro Arts (now World Festival of Black Arts) held in Dakar in 1966; however, as Eldred was then Commonwealth fellow at the University of Leeds, he was unaware of the fact until his landlord gave him a copy of the Guardian report.
Continue reading...‘You’ve bollixed up my book’: letter reveals Hemingway’s fury at being censored
The author threatened to ditch his British publisher, and likened him to a vicar, after his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ expressions were cleaned up
The hard-drinking, hot-tempered American writer Ernest Hemingway was furious when he discovered that the language for the English edition of his latest book had been cleaned up, a previously unpublished letter reveals. “I will make my own bloody decisions as to what I write and what I do not write,” he raged to his British publisher, adding that he did not want the book to be “bollixed up”.
The fury within the lines of the letter would have left Jonathan Cape in no doubt of Hemingway’s feelings about editorial changes to his 1932 nonfiction book about bull-fighting, Death in the Afternoon. That those changes were made without his knowledge or permission left him all the more outraged.
Continue reading...Lyra McKee’s last article: ‘We were meant to be the generation that reaped the spoils of peace’
The reporter was a ‘ceasefire baby’ who grew up in Northern Ireland in the 90s. This is the essay she was working on at the time of her murder last year
They call my generation the “Ceasefire babies”, though I’ve always hated that name. I hated the mocking tone in which it was usually said, as if growing up in the 90s in Belfast was a stroll. There were still soldiers on the street when I was a kid. I remember them – in uniforms and maroon berets, at checkpoints, on pavements, crouching down on one knee, as if ducking out of sight of an enemy the surrounding civilians couldn’t see. I remember walking past one with my sister, then aged about 16, after she had picked me up from school. “Do they wear hats on their heads to stop them from getting cold?” I’d asked. “Yes,” she’d replied, smiling, and the pale-skinned recruit I’d gestured to had smiled as well. He looked barely older than her, perhaps 18. That was around the time I learned that the toy gun I used for games of cowboys and Indians could not be brought outside, in case a passing patrol saw it and mistook it for a real one. It didn’t matter that it was silver with an orange trumpet-top on the end of the barrel.
It had happened, my mother assured me, to a little boy, on the same street where I’d seen the teen soldier. I was never sure if this was urban legend, but the only time I took the gun outside, to the back yard – which was surrounded by a 10ft concrete wall – I’d had the arse smacked off me. The helicopters were out; what if they’d seen it with their cameras, my mother said, and thought it was real? The scenario seemed unlikely to me: that a helicopter, thousands of feet up in the air, would spot a kid playing with a toy and send a patrol to our house. But my mother wasn’t taking any chances.
Continue reading...Living bridges and supper from sewage: can ancient fixes save our crisis-torn world?
From underground aqueducts to tree-bridges and fish that love sewage, indigenous customs could save the planet – but are under threat. Landscape architect Julia Watson shares her ‘lo-TEK’ vision
On the eastern edge of Kolkata, near the smoking mountain of the city’s garbage dump, the 15 million-strong metropolis dissolves into a watery landscape of channels and lagoons, ribboned by highways. This patchwork of ponds might seem like an unlikely place to find inspiration for the future of sustainable cities, but that’s exactly what Julia Watson sees in the marshy muddle.
The network of pools, she explains, are bheris, shallow, flat-bottomed fish ponds that are fed by 700m litres of raw sewage every day – half the city’s output. The ponds produce 13,000 tonnes of fish each year. But the system, which has been operating for a century, doesn’t just produce a huge amount of fish – it treats the city’s wastewater, fertilises nearby rice fields, and employs 80,000 fishermen within a cooperative.
Watson, a landscape architect, says it saves around $22m (£18m) a year on the cost of a conventional wastewater treatment plant, while cutting down on transport, as the fish are sold in local markets. “It is the perfect symbiotic solution,” she says. “It operates entirely without chemicals, seeing fish, algae and bacteria working together to form a sustainable, ecologically balanced engine for the city.”
Continue reading...Don’t panic: the best books to help us survive a crisis
Joe Moran looks at books on how to keep calm in times of adversity - and take joy where we find it
The coronavirus has put life on hold. In this time of fractured human contact and fear of the unknown, we need to read authors who will embolden us for the hard season ahead, while also offering a calming sense of perspective.
Eula Biss’s book-length essay On Immunity does the trick. She begins with the story of Achilles, whose mother dipped him in the river Styx only to leave the vulnerable spot on his heel where she held him. The story’s moral, in Biss’s words, is that “immunity is a myth … and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable”. And yet she admits that she found this message hard to accept after the birth of her son in 2009 – especially when, shortly afterwards, the swine flu epidemic began. Biss explores how hard it is for even the most clear-eyed of us not to succumb to panic and dread.
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