Vincent Brown’s military history sheds precious light on a brutally suppressed revolt which paved the road to abolition
By 1690, Jamaica was the jewel of Britain’s American possessions. An economy largely based on the production of sugar brought wealth and led to the beginnings of an imperial system.
Related: Another Mother review: Jamaica memoir skips island's darker history
Continue reading...Greta Thunberg-effect behind sales boom in books on everything from plastic waste to endangered wildlife
I’m reading one of a small forest’s-worth of beautiful new picture books about the environment with my eight-year-old twins. The Sea, by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jill Calder, takes us into mangrove swamps and kelp forests and coral reefs. We learn about goblin sharks and vampire squids and a poisonous creature called a nudibranch. Then we reach the final chapter on ocean plastics. When we learn that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, Esme bursts into inconsolable tears.
Continue reading...Stephen Fry, Noam Chomsky and more than 40 NGOs say the country’s support for the event is at odds with its record on human rights
As bestselling authors from Jung Chang to Bernardine Evaristo prepare to gather in Abu Dhabi for the first Hay festival in the United Arab Emirates, leading figures have spoken out against the country’s compromised free speech. Stephen Fry - the festival’s president – has joined more than 40 public figures and organisations castigating its government for “promoting a platform for freedom of expression, while keeping behind bars Emirati citizens and residents who shared their own views and opinions”.
An open letter signed by Fry, Noam Chomsky, and a coalition of more than 40 NGOs including Amnesty and PEN International, is calling on the UAE to use the launch of the festival’s Abu Dhabi branch – which opens on Tuesday – to “demonstrate their respect for the right to freedom of expression by freeing all human rights defenders imprisoned for expressing themselves peacefully online”.
Continue reading...John Bolton is “a traitor” and his book should not be published before the election in November, Donald Trump reportedly told aides and media figures.
The president’s views on news of a book deal for Marie Yovanovitch, another key figure in the Ukraine scandal which led to Trump’s impeachment, were not immediately clear.
Continue reading...Raised to hide her low caste, Yashica Dutt’s new book traces her realisation that her history is one of oppression, not shame
Pretending not to be a Dalit took a heavy toll on the young Yashica Dutt.
Her mother, Shashi, was so determined to protect her three children from the discrimination of the Hindu caste system that relegates Dalits to the periphery of society that she pretended the family were Brahmin.
Continue reading...It has inspired TV, stage, film – and now two new art shows. Kathryn Hughes strips back the layers of this classic tale to understand its enduring appeal
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman created feminist fireworks the moment it appeared in the January 1892 edition of the New England Magazine. The short story takes the form of a secret diary written by a young married woman who is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Actually, the diagnosis has been made by her husband, who also happens to be “a physician of high standing”. In line with fashionable medical practice, “John” has prescribed a radical rest cure that involves separating the narrator from her small baby and confining her to the top-floor nursery of a rented country house: “I … am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.”
Gilman was writing out of her own agonising experience: five years earlier, and felled by postnatal depression following the birth of her daughter, she had been sent for treatment to America’s leading expert in women’s mental health, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. His punishing regime for depressed middle-class female patients involved strict bed rest with no reading, writing, painting and, if it could be managed, thinking. His theory was grounded in the pervasive belief that if modern girls stopped wanting things – education, the vote but, above all, “work” – they would become happy, which is to say docile, again. Mitchell instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never to touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman wrote later of her treatment, which felt more like a prison sentence, “I … came perilously close to losing my mind.”
Continue reading...While joining in the congratulations to Costa prize winner Jack Fairweather, I wonder whether the coverage of his book The Volunteer in your pages (for example in G2 on 30 January) might perhaps have led to a couple of misunderstandings, namely that a) Witold Pilecki was an unknown quantity previously and b) his was the only resistance operation in Auschwitz.
In fact, we have known all about Pilecki’s organisational skills since the 1970s thanks to the work of the late writer and historian Józef Garliński. Like Pilecki he had been a Polish officer arrested for underground activities, and he was a prisoner in Auschwitz and other German concentration camps. His bestselling book Fighting Auschwitz (1975) describes other forms of resistance at the camp as well. Whereas Pilecki’s organisation was based entirely on military contacts, there were also political networks, notably the one run by Stanisław Dubois of the Polish Socialist party. Pilecki recognised these other strands and tried to coordinate them. A later communist resistance effort inside the camp was rather ineffectual, since, under orders from Moscow, it was denied support from the communist partisans outside.
Continue reading...Critics fume over the omission of Oxford comma from phrase ‘Peace, prosperity and friendship’ as new coin enters circulation
It is a debate that has torn the nation in two, ripped friends and family apart, and entrenched deep and uncrossable lines throughout the land. Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece?
Three million coins bearing the slogan “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations” are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union.
Continue reading...A guide to ‘the bottom-feeders, crooked lawyers and gossip mongers who created the 45th president’ demands to be read
In February 2019, Jeff Bezos accused David Pecker and the National Enquirer of extortion and blackmail after the tabloid published intimate pictures taken by the Amazon chief. Pecker and co denied being motivated by a desire to aid Donald Trump or receiving a major assist from Saudi Arabia. It was just about gossip.
Related: 'Click I agree': the UN rapporteur says prince tried to intimidate Bezos with message
Continue reading...From Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh to the author of this year’s hit debut, Kiley Reid, a new generation of novelists is turning the marriage plot on its head
Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women begins with an adult Jo March entering the smoke-filled, man-filled offices of a New York publisher in hopes of selling a story. “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end,” the editor decrees. “Or dead, either way.”
Alcott herself never married and thought that Jo “should have remained a literary spinster”. But after publication of the first volume of the book, covering the March sisters’ childhood, Alcott was flooded with letters from fans demanding to know whom the little women had married. In rebellion, Alcott “made a funny match” for Jo, forgoing the obvious choice of Laurie in favour of Professor Bhaer, a middle-aged German, “neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant”.
Continue reading...Latino writers say Jeanine Cummins’ novel uses stereotypes and exploits the suffering of Mexican immigrants
American Dirt, the third novel by Jeanine Cummins, begins with a group of assassins opening fire on a quinceañera cookout. We watch Lydia’s entire family get killed, one by one. Only Lydia and her eight-year-old survive.
The scene is one of many depictions of graphic violence in American Dirt and it has sparked an intense conversation about “pity porn” and writing about the Mexican immigrant experience.
Continue reading...Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporters, have produced a vital and alarming read
In January 2018, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury made headlines as it depicted a president out of control and a White House that careened from crisis to crisis. Donald Trump threatened legal action against author and publisher. He also lauded himself and his electoral college victory: “I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”
Related: Trump 'abused' and 'harassed' Kirstjen Nielsen over border, new book reveals
Continue reading...Political activist Joshua Wong was 20 when he was sentenced in 2017 to six months for his role in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy ‘umbrella movement’
The last words I said before I was taken away from the courtroom were: “Hong Kong people, carry on!” That sums up how I feel about our political struggle. Since Occupy Central – and the umbrella movement that succeeded it – ended without achieving its stated goal, Hong Kong has entered one of its most challenging chapters. Protesters coming out of a failed movement are overcome with disillusionment and powerlessness.
Continue reading...Les Mots à La Bouche’s move from the Marais shows loss of cultural heritage, activists say
In the window of France’s best-known gay bookshop, above the display of Lucian Freud art books, opera singer Maria Callas’s memoirs and a history of the Pride movement, a poster warns in giant red letters: “Cultural heritage in danger.” An urgent note on the door adds: “We need your help!”
Les Mots à La Bouche, a 40-year-old Paris institution, is the top LGBT bookshop in France and considered one of the best in the world – a focal point of Paris’s historic gay neighbourhood in the Marais district. But as property speculation in central Paris reaches dizzying heights – it is estimated that at certain times of year there are more Airbnb rentals than residents in the Marais – the bookshop is being forced out by rising rents.
Continue reading...Hashi Mohamed is a 36-year-old barrister. He has the accent, a mentor once told of him, of someone who’s “been to Eton” and the confidence of a natural orator. If you had to place him within the complex matrix of the British class system, you’d probably say he was the son of wealthy Africans who attended an independent school and Oxbridge.
In fact, Mohamed is a Somali who was born in Kenya, where he lived in a rundown part of Nairobi with his four siblings (another having died), his mother (who also had six children from a previous marriage) and his travelling salesman father. When his father died in a car accident in 1993, Mohamed and three of his siblings were sent to England as refugees.
Continue reading...Andrea Bernstein delivers the goods on the bad business which propelled two New York families to Washington
America’s cold civil war rages, impeachment inches ahead and Donald Trump remains a focal point of conflict. As for Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, he is markedly more unpopular than his wife, her father or her gun-toting brother. Donald Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump are rated among the top Republican contenders for 2024.
Related: Trump Jr and Ivanka Trump ‘knew they were lying’ over ploy to sell condos, book claims
Continue reading...Writer of bestselling memoir about clinical depression died from metastatic breast cancer on Tuesday
Elizabeth Wurtzel, journalist and author of bestselling memoir Prozac Nation, has died at the age of 52.
Writer David Samuels, Wurtzel’s friend since childhood, told the New York Times that Wurtzel had died from metastatic breast cancer in Manhattan on Tuesday. Wurtzel, who tested positively for the BRCA genetic mutation, was an vocal advocate for BRCA testing in her journalism, all the while maintaining a defiant attitude in the face of pity. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, she noted: “I hate it when people say that they are sorry about my cancer. Really? Have they met me? I am not someone that you feel sorry for. I am the original mean girl. I now have stage-four upgrade privileges. I can go right to the front. But it’s always been like this. I am a line-cutter. Which is to say, I was precocious. I was early for history.”
Continue reading...New book describes sexual relationship between Matzneff and 14-year-old girl
Paris prosecutors have opened a rape investigation into the author Gabriel Matzneff, a day after the publication of a book detailing his sexual relationship with a girl of 14 more than three decades ago.
The case has attracted huge interest in France, which is only now beginning to scrutinise decades of what are seen by some as permissive attitudes towards sexual exploitation and paedophilia.
Continue reading...‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’ the poet wrote to Emily Hale
TS Eliot’s love letters to scholar Emily Hale, the great poet’s muse and source of “supernatural ecstasy” for more than 30 years, were released on Thursday amid fevered speculation and under tight security at an elegant library on the campus of the Ivy League’s Princeton University.
The Nobel laureate’s correspondence to Hale, whom he met when both were studying at Harvard University in 1912, has long been the fascination of Eliot scholars but remained hidden, on both the poet and Hale’s wishes, for 50 years after Hale’s death in 1969.
Continue reading...Vanessa Springora describes relationship with Gabriel Matzneff, then 50, in new book
The French literary world is in shock after a leading publishing director, Vanessa Springora, alleged in a new book that she was groomed into a damaging relationship from the age of 14 with an acclaimed author who was 50.
Springora’s book, Le Consentement (Consent), will be published in France in January and has already been met with critical acclaim and sent shockwaves through the close-knit world of Paris intellectuals. It has been described as a #MeToo moment for France’s literary circles.
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