Books
God, guns and America
While training as a playwright, I was taught that any gun brought onstage must go off. Anton Chekhov said, ‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no… Continue reading
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Nate Silver interview: ‘Politics is uniquely full of bullshit’
Nate Silver doesn’t suffer fools gladly — especially fools who pass themselves off as experts. In the second chapter of his book, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and… Continue reading
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Interview with James Wood
James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for… Continue reading
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Interview with a writer: John Ashbery
John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of… Continue reading
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Abraham Lincoln ‘somehow’ became the great redeemer
Abraham Lincoln, in Walt Whitman’s celebrated phrase, contained multitudes. M.E. Synon showed yesterday quite how many there might have been. There is evidence of prejudice, callousness and corruption. Yet there… Continue reading
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Abraham Lincoln, the ‘specious humbug’
This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the… Continue reading
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Yoram Kaniuk, reluctant soldier in 1948
Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After his experience in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Kaniuk moved to New York where he became a painter in Greenwich… Continue reading
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Which words would you ban?
Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English… Continue reading
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Barack Obama’s best voice: Michael Grunwald
No Obama policy – not even ‘Obamacare’ – has been derided quite as much as his stimulus package and the $787 billion Recovery Act passed in February 2009. It became… Continue reading
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The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker – an ideal Christmas present
Nicholson Baker is intensely interested. He looks at the world like he has never seen it before, fixating on the mundane and capitalizing upon the strange lacunae which exist between… Continue reading
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The Atlantic, the ocean that made the modern world
Just as the classical world was built around the Mediterranean, the modern world was built around the Atlantic. The Romans called the Med ‘Mare Nostrum’ – Our Sea. The Atlantic,… Continue reading
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Philip Roth retires
Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he… Continue reading
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Thornton Wilder’s theatrics in The Cabala
I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After… Continue reading
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Back to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one… Continue reading
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Interview: James Lasdun’s art
James Lasdun published his first book of short stories The Silver Age in 1985. The debut won him The Dylan Thomas Award, and was followed by Three Evenings another book… Continue reading
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The death of Osama bin Laden
Everyone knows something of what happened the night American Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. Frenzied reports followed the news of his death… Continue reading
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Interview: John R. MacArthur on the US election
When Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, millions of citizens across the United States believed it was a new dawn for the American political system. Obama promised… Continue reading
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The language of criminals
The English language is, as English would have it, an odd duck. Its nuances are capricious — to the non-native, maliciously so — but its lyricism widely praised. My preoccupation… Continue reading
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished business
It’s hard enough convincing people to read finished novels much less unfinished ones — though perhaps our cultural obsession with The Great Gatsby is reason enough to republish F. Scott… Continue reading
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Hot War in the South China Sea?
Like the deserts of the Middle East, the barren islands of the South China Sea now loom as a new theatre of war. Asian countries, indeed America, too, are at… Continue reading
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