Amid chaos at the White House as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Donald Trump took to referring derisively to the Covid taskforce chaired by his vice-president as “that fucking council that Mike has”.
Related: New Michael Wolff book reports Trump’s confusion during Capitol attack
Related: Top US general got into shouting match with Trump over race protests – report
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
Related: ‘Republicans are defunding the police’: Fox News anchor stumps congressman
Continue reading...Charles Dickens Museum opens new display, which will encourage visitors to follow in the author’s footsteps around the nearby sites that inspired the novel
When Charles Dickens was writing Oliver Twist in 1837, he required a suitably horrible magistrate to preside over Oliver’s trial for pick-pocketing. Dickens knew exactly who to base the character on: a notorious Mr Laing, who worked in Hatton Garden, down the road from the author’s London home on Doughty Street.
Dickens asked an acquaintance to “smuggle” him into Laing’s offices. The man would go on to appear in the novel, thinly disguised as the dreadful Mr Fang, a man of “flushed face” who, “if he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages”.
Continue reading...Lauded for centuries but a puzzle for many readers, The Anatomy of Melancholy has at last been demystified
Admired by everyone from John Milton to Nick Cave, The Anatomy of Melancholy has always been a text that has dazzled and confounded its readers in equal measure.
Now, exactly 400 years after it was published, an academic has painstakingly traced the meaning of thousands of its sphinxlike allusions, enigmatic references and arcane quotations, allowing Robert Burton’s famous text to be fully understood for the very first time.
Continue reading...Gen Mark Milley, the top US military leader, resisted Donald Trump’s demands that his forces “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out” of protesters marching against police brutality and structural racism, according to a much-trailed new book.
Related: Trump proposed sending Americans with Covid to Guantánamo, book claims
Related: Trump hoped Covid-19 would ‘take out’ former aide John Bolton, book claims
Continue reading...Summer, written at speed last year, takes political fiction award while Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires takes matching nonfiction honour
Ali Smith has won the Orwell prize for political fiction for Summer, a novel written at speed last year, which judges described as “a time-capsule which will prove to be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the mood of Britain during this turbulent time”.
The Scottish author came up with her project to write four political novels in real time back in 2015, starting with Autumn. Smith began writing Summer, the final book in her Seasonal Quartet, in January 2020 and it was published in August. The novel includes references to Covid-19, Australian wildfires, Brexit and the murder of George Floyd.
Related: Summer by Ali Smith review – a remarkable end to an extraordinary quartet
Continue reading...Rediscovered papers thought to record the memories of a longstanding friend say the ‘father of liberalism’ plagiarised and lied about never reading Thomas Hobbes
John Locke is regarded today as one of England’s greatest philosophers, an Enlightenment thinker known as the “father of liberalism”. But a previously unknown memoir attributed to one of his close friends paints a different picture – of a vain, lazy and pompous man who “amused himself with trifling works of wit”, and a plagiarist who “took from others whatever he was able to take”.
Dr Felix Waldmann, a history lecturer at Cambridge, found the short memoir at the British Library while looking through the papers of 18th-century historian Thomas Birch, who had acquired a trove of manuscripts from his contemporaries. Among these were drafts of a preface to an edition of Locke’s minor works by Huguenot journalist Pierre des Maizeaux. Sandwiched between Des Maizeaux’s drafts were five pages written in French, in which the journalist had recorded an interview with an anonymised “Mr …” about Locke.
Continue reading...• Nightmare Scenario details final year of presidency
• Washington Post reporters’ book one of several on Trump
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.
Related: Trump proposed sending Americans with Covid to Guantánamo, book claims
Continue reading...Ambrose Follows His Nose, found half-finished last year among the late children’s author’s papers, will be published to mark his centenary in 2022
An unfinished manuscript by the late children’s author Dick King-Smith that was discovered in his daughter’s loft will be published this year, after it was completed by his great-granddaughter.
Beloved for his stories of talking animals, King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of 88, leaving more than 100 books behind him, from his debut The Fox Busters, published when he was in his 50s, to The Sheep-Pig, which was adapted into the film Babe.
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...Appeal has so far raised more than $200,000, after the two-storey Samir Mansour bookshop, containing tens of thousands of books, was bombed in May
Donations of money and books from around the world have flooded in to help rebuild one of Gaza’s largest booksellers, the two-storey Samir Mansour bookshop, which was destroyed by Israeli air strikes in May.
Founded 21 years ago by Palestinian Mansour, the shop was a much-loved part of the local community and contained tens of thousands of books in various languages covering everything from philosophy and art history to fiction and children’s books. It was reduced to rubble on 18 May, during the 11-day conflict that killed more than 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel.
Continue reading...The work highlights the plaques and art that celebrate a neglected side of the capital’s culture
She’s 10ft tall, barefoot, with a simple wrap dress stretching across her breasts and belly. She holds aloft an infant, gazing into its eyes. This is Bronze Woman, a statue on a busy traffic junction in Stockwell, south London. Unveiled in 2008, it was then the first public statue of a black woman on permanent display in England.
“I used to pass by but never knew what it was for many years. One day I found myself in front of it and I was truly blown away,” said Avril Nanton, who runs walking tours of London’s black history.
Continue reading...Richard Cohen’s work, revised after criticism of its viewpoint, will not be published this week after a new row over its title
Billed as an “epic exploration of who writes about the past”, The History Makers was due out this Friday before being serialised on Radio 4 in the UK. But publication has been postponed at the last minute amid bitter rows over race and appropriation.
The Observer reported last month that author Richard Cohen was asked by his US publishers to rewrite part of his 800-page book, which covers 2,500 years, after failing to take into account enough black historians, academics and writers. Cohen added an 18,000-word chapter, plus extra material in existing chapters, to include individuals such as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the sociologist WEB Du Bois and the author Toni Morrison.
Continue reading...Authors blame government ‘prejudice’ against humanities, as loss of applicants hits university courses
Novelists including Mark Haddon this week accused the government of “baseless prejudice” against the humanities as they made an impassioned plea for universities not to ditch their English degrees despite a slump in applications.
By the January application deadline this year, 7,045 18-year-olds in the UK had applied to study English at university, a fall of more than a third from 10,740 in 2012, according to data from the admissions service Ucas. Experts say this is because far fewer students are now studying English at A-level. Over the same period there has been a boom in applications for subjects such as computer science, psychology and maths.
Continue reading...New Yorker writer, whose scepticism about her trade brought her both praise and blame, was also famed for studies of psychoanalysis and Sylvia Plath
Janet Malcolm, the American journalist who dissected the relationship between the writer and their subject in books including The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives and The Silent Woman, has died aged 86.
Her daughter Anne confirmed to the New York Times that the cause was lung cancer.
Related: A life in writing: Janet Malcolm
Related: The flash of the knife: Ian Jack on The Journalist and the Murderer
Continue reading...Blue plaques left unchanged, but charity website details Blyton’s ‘old-fashioned xenophobia’ and Kipling’s ‘imperialist sentiments’
English Heritage has acknowledged the “racism, xenophobia and lack of literary merit” in Enid Blyton’s writing, and the “racist and imperialist sentiments” of Rudyard Kipling, as part of its ongoing efforts to better reflect today’s values in its blue plaques.
While English Heritage’s blue plaques commemorating both authors remain unchanged, the charity’s online information about both now goes into detail about the problematic aspects of their writing and views.
Join a Guardian Live discussion looking at the global impact one year on from the murder of George Floyd. With Oliver Laughland and a panel of global activists including Rokhaya Diallo, Gacheke Gachihi and Rina Odula. On Wednesday 30 June, 7pm BST | 8pm CEST | 11am PDT | 2pm EDT. Book tickets here
Continue reading...Author of Fire and Fury’s final book on the Trump years, Landslide, will cover the president’s ‘tumultuous last months at the helm of the country’
Michael Wolff is set to write his third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency in the provocatively titled Landslide.
Wolff shook Trump’s White House when he published the runaway bestseller Fire and Fury in 2018. An explosive exposé of the first stage of Trump’s presidency, it sold 1.7m copies around the world during its first three weeks on sale, and prompted the former US president to tweet, back when he was allowed access to Twitter: “Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book.”
Related: Trump insists he’s writing ‘book of all books’ but big publishers unlikely to touch it
Continue reading...Friends of the National Libraries launch ‘once in a generation’ effort to raise £15m to buy the Honresfield library, packed with works by Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and Walter Scott
From the British Library to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a consortium of libraries and museums have come together in an “unprecedented” effort to raise £15m and save an “astonishingly important” set of literary manuscripts for the nation.
The plans were formed after the announcement last month that the “lost” Honresfield library was to be put up for auction at Sotheby’s this summer. Almost entirely inaccessible since 1939, the library was put together by Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century, and is a literary treasure trove that had experts dancing with excitement – and warning that action needed to be taken to prevent it being sold piecemeal to private collectors.
Continue reading...The novelist describes helping two writers who went on to insult her online, and condemns era of ‘angels jostling to out-angel one another’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”.
Titled It Is Obscene, the essay was published by the Nigerian novelist and feminist on her website on Tuesday night. It attracted so much attention that her website temporarily crashed.
Continue reading...This year’s online-only E3 video game expo was hardly the usual explosion of blockbuster games, but there were still some standout stories
We all wanted to see Metroid Prime 4, the long-anticipated first-person science-fiction shooter-adventure that has been in development at Nintendo for an absolute age. But instead we got a whole new Metroid – a 2D one in the vein of the SNES and Game Boy Advance classics, the first game in the series in this style for about 19 years. Metroid Dread features Samus Aran being chased by distressing, transforming drone-robots who appear to be largely impervious to her ever-expanding array of weapons, and it looks genuinely scary. It’ll be out on 8 October on Nintendo Switch.
Continue reading...The UK’s most prestigious prize for children’s books goes to the US ambassador for young people’s literature, while Canadian Sydney Smith takes Kate Greenaway medal for illustration
American author Jason Reynolds has won the UK’s top children’s books prize, the Carnegie medal, for his “breathtakingly gripping” stories about children on their walk home from school, Look Both Ways.
Continue reading...A theme of ‘destructive loss’ is shared by the six books shortlisted for the $60,000 award
Two first-time novelists, a previous Man Booker prize-winner and a veteran writer of eight works of fiction are among the six authors shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin award, Australia’s highest literary honour.
Announced at the State Library of NSW on Wednesday night by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, the chair of the judging panel, Richard Neville, said there appeared to be common thread of “destructive loss” among the six works shortlisted.
Continue reading...Written by Yvvette Edwards and Irenosen Okojie, the ‘timely and clear-eyed’ play will be live-streamed in July
The publishing industry’s lack of diversity is to be the focus of a new comic play by award-winning writers Yvvette Edwards and Irenosen Okojie, who want it to be a “subtle and pertinent” reminder of the challenges black writers face.
The Green Room will be directed by the Manchester Royal Exchange’s joint artistic director Roy Alexander Weise and produced by Alex Wheatle, who said the play is a “reminder for publishers and writers of all backgrounds of what black creatives have to navigate in their chosen careers.”
Continue reading...Annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses will see dream of ‘citizen’ character played out for real
The cantankerous xenophobe referred to as the “citizen” in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses seems poised to finally get his wish after more than a century.
In Joyce’s literary masterpiece, set in Dublin on 16 June 1904, the character rails against foreigners, Jews and the “thicklugged” English and yearns for an Irish battleship to fly the flag of the province of Munster, which shows three crowns on a blue field.
On display! #UBuffalo, home to the world’s largest James Joyce collection, unveiled a 36-foot #UBJamesJoyce mural in downtown Buffalo today for #Bloomsday2021 See the photos ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/V78nA1M9hy
Continue reading...Figures at major houses said book might stoke ‘staff uprising’ and it would be ‘too hard to get a book that was factually accurate’
Donald Trump has insisted he is writing “the book of all books” – even though major figures in US publishing said on Tuesday that no big house is likely to touch a memoir by the 45th president because it might stoke “a staff uprising” and it would be “too hard to get a book that was factually accurate”.
Related: What Were We Thinking review: Carlos Lozada on why Trump books matter
Continue reading...The former West Indies fast bowler has written a book about his experiences of encountering racial prejudice, with contributions from famous names such as Usain Bolt and Naomi Osaka
In his playing days in the 1970s and 1980s, the West Indian cricketer Michael Holding didn’t speak out against racism, although he saw it all around him. “I chose not to confront it because I was being selfish,” he says. “You saw what happened to athletes when they tried to speak up. Their careers came to an end.”
He remembers John Carlos and Tommie Smith, the two African-American athletes who famously raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Mexico Olympics during the medal ceremony for the 200m. “There wasn’t enough pressure on people to heed a black man calling out back then,” he says.
Continue reading...Key figures in UK arts, culture and sport rewarded in list dominated by heroes and heroines of pandemic
The Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith, the poet Lemn Sissay and the singer-songwriter Alison Moyet are among notable figures in the arts to have been recognised in the Queen’s birthday honours list.
In a list dominated once again by the heroes and heroines of the coronavirus pandemic, and particularly key players in Britain’s successful vaccine rollout, there remained room to laud the achievements of people in the nation’s fields of arts, culture and sport.
Related: Keir Starmer accuses Boris Johnson of failure of leadership in anti-racism row
Continue reading...Actor will perform two tales with a musical theme featuring characters confronting their mortality with defiance
A pair of Julian Barnes stories about old age are to be performed by Ian McDiarmid in a one-man show touring the UK this autumn.
Michael Grandage will direct The Lemon Table, which adapts two tales with a musical theme from Barnes’s 2004 story collection of the same name. In Vigilance, a concertgoer is driven into a fury by the fidgeting, rustling and vigorous throat-clearing of his fellow audience members. In The Silence, an unnamed composer modelled on Sibelius reflects on his career and how silence follows both music and life.
The Lemon Table opens at Salisbury Playhouse (part of Wiltshire Creative) in October and tours to Sheffield Theatres, Yvonne Arnaud theatre in Guildford, Home in Manchester and Malvern Theatres.
Continue reading...Falling sales blamed as 20 jobs axed in final chapter for history of printing in the city, which stretches back to the earliest days of book publishing
Oxford University’s right to print books was first recognised in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing.
The closure of Oxuniprint, which will take place on 27 August subject to consultation with employees, will result in the loss of 20 jobs. OUP said it follows a “continued decline in sales”, which has been “exacerbated by factors relating to the pandemic”.
Continue reading...Romance writer was criticised for episode in new novel when one of her child characters compares hiding in an attic to the life of the Holocaust diarist
Bestselling romance author Elin Hilderbrand has asked her publisher to remove a reference to Anne Frank from her latest novel after criticism, apologising to readers for including what she described as an “offensive and tasteless” passage in the book.
Hilderbrand, whose books are generally set around Nantucket Island, has just published her latest novel, Golden Girl, in which author and mother-of-three Vivian is killed in a car accident, and watches her family’s life from the “Beyond” for one last summer.
Continue reading...Author, who was arrested last year in Harare while protesting against corruption, is hailed by judges as a ‘voice of hope we all need to hear’
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the Booker-shortlisted Zimbabwean writer who was arrested last year in Harare while protesting against corruption, has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize, praised for her “ability to capture and communicate vital truths even amidst times of upheaval”.
The prize is given by free speech campaigners English PEN in memory of the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. It goes to a writer of “outstanding literary merit” who, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech, shows a “fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”. Previous winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood and Linton Kwesi Johnson.
Continue reading...Poor is in line for the Felix Dennis first collection award, while the contenders for best collection are praised for their ‘limitless’ ambition
Caleb Femi, the former young people’s laureate for London, has been shortlisted for one of the prestigious Forward prizes for poetry for his first collection Poor, an exploration of growing up Black in Peckham.
Femi, a former English teacher who took on the laureate role in 2016, is one of five first-time poets in the running for the £5,000 Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. Poor combines poetry and photography as Femi sets out, in his words, to “articulate the lives and times of my community of north Peckham”. It includes a poem dedicated to the murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor, who Femi knew.
Continue reading...Inclusion of affluent, mainly white Manchester suburb in list of Muslim-dominated towns derided by locals
MailOnline has been criticised for a story claiming there are British towns that are no-go areas for white people, generating particular ridicule for the inclusion of the Manchester suburb of Didsbury.
The article is based on a book by former Islamist radical Ed Husain called Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain, in which he details how he believes communities have become divided.
Continue reading...British novelist says republished works were presented as ‘wimmins fiction of the worst kind’
The author Jeanette Winterson has set fire to a pile of her newly republished books after saying she “hated the cosy little domestic blurbs” on them.
In a tweet on Friday night, the author defiantly wrote: “Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers. Turned me into wimmins fiction of the worst kind! Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there. So I set them on fire.”
Related: Jeanette Winterson: ‘I didn’t see this coming’
Continue reading...Exclusive: ex-PM cites example of Margaret Thatcher whose political demise came soon after landslide win
Boris Johnson’s conduct in office could still sink him despite his buoyancy in opinion polls, Gordon Brown has said, recalling the demise of Margaret Thatcher three years after a landslide election victory because “mistakes … caught up with her”.
The former Labour prime minister, speaking to the Guardian as he publishes a new book, also praised the climate movement, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and predicted huge electoral changes across the world that he said would be led by the young.
Gordon Brown will be in conversation with Jonathan Freedland as part of our digital festival on Wednesday 9 June. Book tickets here
Continue reading...Publishing staff, in rows over authors from Mike Pence to Woody Allen, are voicing their reluctance to work on books they deem hateful. But is this really ‘younger refuseniks’, or a much older debate?
In the 1960s, Simon & Schuster’s co-founder Max Schuster was facing a dilemma. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and armaments minister, had written a memoir providing new insights into the workings of Nazi leadership. As Michael Korda, Schuster’s editor-in-chief, recounted in his memoir Another Life, Schuster knew it would be a huge success. “There is only one problem,” he said, “and it’s this: I do not want to see Albert Speer’s name and mine on the same book.”
In the liberal industry of publishing, the tension that exists between profit and morality is nothing new, whether it’s Schuster turning down Speer (the book was finally published by Macmillan), or the UK government introducing legislation to prevent criminals making money from writing about their crimes.
Too many areas of discussion feel like they’re off limits – which should hardly be the case in an industry that disseminates ideas
This is so often framed as younger editors being oversensitive, rather than acknowledging that what senior editors choose to publish has an impact on the terms of public debate
Do we just have to wait for all the people making dodgy editorial decisions with no integrity to retire?
Continue reading...Diop is the first French writer to win the prize for translated fiction – split with his translator Anna Moschovakis – for novel about a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the first world war
David Diop has become the first French novelist to win the International Booker prize for translated fiction with At Night All Blood Is Black, his first novel translated into English.
Diop, the author of two novels, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, split the £50,000 annual prize, which goes to the best author and translator of a work translated into English. At Night All Blood Is Black follows Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the first world war, whose descent into madness after the death of a childhood friend on the frontline begins to show itself in extreme brutality against enemy German soldiers in the trenches.
Related: 'There is a thirst for writers of mixed heritage': what is France reading?
Continue reading...Writer’s attempts to stay ‘invisible’ while marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil will be explored in monologues by well-known authors and actors
Sixty years ago, in 1961, Samuel Beckett slipped away to Folkestone to marry his long-time partner Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil at a secret ceremony. Now the playwright and novelist’s incognito wedding at the register office in Kent has inspired an immersive multimedia event at the forthcoming Folkestone book festival, with major names Helen Oyeyemi, Rupert Thomson and Eimear McBride writing a series of monologues from the perspectives of those there at the time.
In March 1961, Beckett drove from his home in Paris to Le Touquet airport, flying from there to Lydd airport in Kent and checking in for two weeks at the Hotel Bristol on the Leas clifftop in Folkestone. He spent the evenings working on his play Happy Days in local pubs, with the Kent place names Borough Green and Sevenoaks making their way into his second draft.
Related: Beckett's letters to Barbara Bray: 'Hammer hammer adamantine words'
Continue reading...Harry Potter publisher issues third profit upgrade of 2021 after sales increase to £185m
Lockdown reading has helped the Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury to its third profit upgrade of the year after a 22% surge in annual pre-tax profits.
The company said people had “rediscovered the joy of reading” during the coronavirus pandemic, pushing its sales 14% higher to £185m in the 12 months to the end of February.
Continue reading...