He was the good-looking former soldier whose job was to protect the most powerful woman in Britain. Sexually bewitched, his top concern became her personal safety. Sound familiar?
A scholarly new biography of Sir Walter Raleigh will argue that the great Elizabethan explorer followed the same path to the centre of government as the lead character in the BBC’s hit show Bodyguard.
Continue reading...Ricky O’Rawe’s book has echoes of 2004 Belfast raid, which remains unsolved
On 19 December 2004, masked raiders took £26.5m in cash from the vaults of Belfast’s Northern Bank, loaded it on to a truck and vanished into the night.
It was one of the most audacious heists in British criminal history, and it left an enduring riddle: did the IRA do it? Police on both sides of the Irish border suspected so, but the group denied any involvement. The robbers have not been caught and the investigation remains open.
Continue reading...Nobel laureate bemoans attacks on girls’ education and calls on young people to mobilise politically in run-up to February poll
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has urged youth to mobilise before next year’s election in Nigeria in the hope that that a new, potentially female leader can emerge to “radically transform” the country.
“It desperately needs a committed idealist who can build a team around himself or herself and just tell these old fogies to go and take a rest,” said the Nigerian poet and playwright.
“I don’t romanticise youth, I’m just saying I’m tired of my generation.”
If young people combine forces they can get rid of the old brigade. I tell them: ‘Don’t sit there grumbling, mobilise'
Continue reading...Due out next spring and set in an alternate 1980s London, the book depicts a man and a woman drawn into a love triangle with a ‘synthetic human’
Ian McEwan’s next novel will see the Booker prize-winning author venture into science fiction, as he unpicks the moral dilemma created when a love triangle forms around a “synthetic human”.
Machines Like Me, set for publication next April, will be set in an alternative version of 1980s London, where Alan Turing has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, Britain has lost the Falklands war and Margaret Thatcher is battling Tony Benn for power. The novel centres on Charlie, a man “drifting through life and dodging full-time employment”, who has fallen in love with Miranda, a student with a secret.
Continue reading...Writer says criticism of young people is unfair and older generation deserve no respect
It is unfair to deride millennials as “snowflakes” or to criticise them as overly sensitive, self-centred or ignorant because it is their parents who are at fault, the author Fay Weldon has said.
“We should stop being beastly to the snowflakes since we, their forebears, left them with such a mess to clear up and no tools to deal with it,” she said. “Today’s young grow up into a violent, angry, unstable environment, all too likely to end up jobless, homeless and childless, unlikely to reach their full potential. They are probably the most despairing generation ever conceived. The least we can do is not add to their burden by slagging them off.”
Continue reading...Sapiens author has criticised the US president’s rejection of international cooperation, as well as admonishing Brexiters’ ‘fantasy’ of independence
Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari has warned Donald Trump that global cooperation is crucial if humanity is to face its “existential crisis”, after the US president publicly rejected the approach at the UN this week.
The Israeli academic, whose books about the past and future of humanity, Sapiens and Homo Deus, have sold in their millions, said Trump’s speech embracing “the doctrine of patriotism” was very disturbing.
[Brexit] is just a fantasy about being independent ... there are no longer any independent countries in the world
Continue reading...Set for a 2019 release, the former Beatle said his book about a magical grandfather is written for ‘for grandparents everywhere’
Following in the footsteps of fellow children’s book luminaries Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Madonna, Paul McCartney is to write his own picture book.
Hey Grandude follows an elderly, magical gentleman called Grandude – who “represents grandfathers everywhere”, according to McCartney – and his adventures with his four grandchildren.
Continue reading...The UK’s oldest prize for children’s books is to be restructured after a report into failings that left 2017’s award shortlist entirely white
The UK’s oldest prize for children’s literature, the Carnegie medal, has promised long-term change following a review of its lack of diversity, which one respondent said stemmed from the fact that “literature in the UK is an unapologetic bastion of white privilege”.
Related: All-white Carnegie medal longlist provokes anger from children's authors
Continue reading...The publication of a bestseller about bribery in the country comes amid a wave of corruption allegations against senior politicians
The book topping Argentina’s bestseller list is not a thriller or a murder mystery. It’s a crime story of another sort: a blockbuster about political corruption that suggests that bribery is an integral part of the country’s body politic.
“The reality of corruption in Argentina surpasses fiction,” said Hugo Alconada Mon, an investigative journalist and the author of The Root of All Evil, which was published just as the country was shaken by a wave of graft allegations against senior politicians across the ideological spectrum.
Related: Argentina: ex-president Cristina Fernández charged in bribery scandal
Related: Operation Car Wash: The biggest corruption scandal ever?
Continue reading...Edition of DH Lawrence novel used by Sir Lawrence Byrne in presiding over the landmark prosecution will be auctioned in October
A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover used by the judge who presided over the novel’s 1960 obscenity trial, complete with annotations from his wife noting where DH Lawrence descended to writing about “love making”, is set to be auctioned this autumn, for the first time in 25 years.
The 1960 trial saw Penguin Books prosecuted for publishing the unexpurgated text of Lawrence’s novel. It was a test case for the Obscene Publications Act 1959, which ruled that a work was obscene if its effect “is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons”.
Continue reading...New book showcases second world war papers, including a sketch of Dunkirk evacuation plans and Churchill’s annotated End of the Beginning speech
From a hasty sketch detailing the plan for one regiment’s escape from Dunkirk, to the handwritten annotations on Winston Churchill’s End of the Beginning speech, a clutch of rarely seen documents from the second world war are being published – many for the first time - by the Imperial War Museum.
The museum’s head of documents Anthony Richards sorted through thousands of papers in the IWM archives to come up with 20 he felt defined the second world war. These include a “diagrammatic layout of embarkation” in which Capt Ken Theobald of the Fifth Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment detailed the plan the British Expeditionary Force would use to help his regiment escape the Dunkirk beaches in 1940.
Continue reading...Correspondence cache records early adventures with Hell’s Angels and tracks the emergence of his signature gonzo style
A stash of 180 letters from Hunter S Thompson to a childhood friend, recording how a struggling writer unable to pay his bills became the gonzo journalist who would declare that “I am not going to be either the Fitzgerald or the Hemingway of this generation … I am going to be the Thompson of this generation”, is to be sold at auction.
Spanning hundreds of pages, the letters were written to Thompson’s friend Paul Semonin, beginning in February 1955 when Thompson was 17 and ending in 1974. The letters are set to be sold by Nate D Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles on 27 September, with bidding set to open at $110,000 (£84,000).
Continue reading...The search for a gifted gardener cheated of a scholarship with the Royal Horticultural Society in 1898 because she was female was under way this weekend – just one of a number of efforts to move notable women from the footnotes of history.
The greenfingered “Miss Harrison” won a chance to train at the society in Chiswick by gaining top marks in its annual exam, but was blocked by its head, the Rev William Wilks. “Only males being allowed at Chiswick, it was never contemplated that a female might claim the scholarship,” he had ruled The society discovered the story while sifting through its archives and is trying to discover more about her fate.
Continue reading...Prize renamed in 2016 to honour the late ‘godfather of tartan noir’ William McIlvanney goes to his son for The Quaker, based on the Bible John murders
Two years after the award for the best Scottish crime novel was renamed in honour of the “godfather of tartan noir” William McIlvanney, his son and fellow crime writer Liam McIlvanney has landed the prize.
William McIlvanney, who died in 2015, was the author of the acclaimed DI Jack Laidlaw series, set in Glasgow. In 2016, the Bloody Scotland international crime writing festival renamed its prize, citing McIlvanney as “the man who, more than anyone, established the tradition of Scottish detective fiction”.
Continue reading...After much online glee, the publisher has removed the first glimpse of the superhero’s genitals from its latest Batman issue – prompting fans to chase unaltered copies
DC Comics has withdrawn a page of a new comic that showed Batman’s genitals for the first time, leaving fans scrambling to get hold of existing issues featuring what has rapidly become known as the “batawang”.
Published this week, Batman: Damned – part of a new, “edgy and provocative” line from DC – features Batman and the magician John Constantine hunting for a killer in Gotham City. The nude scene, drawn by Lee Bermejo, occurs as Batman removes the Batsuit for a body scan from his computer. The superhero’s genitals were visible in the print edition, but obscured by darkness in digital editions.
Continue reading...Spoken word artist says search was unjustified and officers were rude to his parents
The acclaimed spoken word artist George the Poet has said police strip-searched him because officers stereotype young black men, lacking any positive interactions with them.
The 27-year-old poet, real name George Mpanga, who counts Prince Harry among his friends and appeared on BBC Question Time earlier this year, was searched by police in a van outside his parents’ house in Neasden, north London.
Continue reading...Publication remains silent over rift with Ian Buruma, who faced criticism over his editorial decisions on #MeToo movement
Ian Buruma, the former editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books who was forced out of the job after barely a year amid a row over his editorial judgment relating to #MeToo, has complainedhe has been “publicly pilloried” and “convicted on Twitter”.
A day after the announcement of Buruma’s departure from the literary magazine, the NYRB itself has yet to give an explanation for the rift with its chief editor – only the third person to hold the top post since the review was founded in 1963. The silence means Buruma has got his side of the story out first, portraying himself as a victim of social media bullying.
Related: New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma departs amid outrage over essay
Continue reading...Writer and academic steps down after publishing and defending Jian Ghomeshi piece deemed to be at odds with spirit of #MeToo
Ian Buruma, the writer and academic, has stepped down from the editorship of the New York Review of Books after only 16 months, after he caused outrage by publishing and defending an essay widely deemed to be at odds with the spirit of #MeToo.
The departure of Buruma, only the third editor after Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein since the magazine was founded in 1963, comes as a jolt so soon after he took over the helm of America’s most prestigious literary journal.
Related: Jian Ghomeshi essay on sexual assault trial met with backlash
Continue reading...Written 10 years before the book that defined the Beat Generation, appeal for a $25 sub is now on sale in California for $22,500
He may have been the godfather of the Beat Generation, a self-styled crazy hobo mystic who hit the US’s highways looking for himself, but Jack Kerouac wasn’t above asking his mother for money to tide him over on the epic journey he immortalised in On The Road.
In a letter from 1947, written at the height of the travels that would form the basis of his classic roman a clef published 10 years later, Kerouac begs his mother, Gabrielle, for $25 to help him get from Denver to California.
Related: Visions of Jack Kerouac ... in an epic 13 volumes
Continue reading...The 27-year-old British author’s debut Everything Under is up for the £50,000 award, while Michael Ondaatje and the first nominated graphic novel are knocked out
The 27-year-old debut novelist Daisy Johnson has landed a place on the Man Booker prize shortlist, making the British author the youngest writer ever to make the final cut for the £50,000 literary award.
Johnson was chosen for the final Booker six, ahead of bestselling longlisted novels from former winner Michael Ondaatje and the widely acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney, for Everything Under, about a lexicographer searching for her mother. Judge Val McDermid called it a “modern variation on Sophocles’ Oedipus”, in which “the natural world is evoked with sinister sensitivity”.
Related: Everything Under by Daisy Johnson review – a stunning debut novel
Continue reading...Labour deputy says adviser should back up claim intelligence services are undermining party
A claim by one of Jeremy Corbyn’s advisers that the intelligence services are tacitly working to undermine Labour is “a bit John le Carré”, the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has said, saying the adviser should provide evidence of the allegation.
Andrew Murray, a union official and formerly chair of the Stop the War campaign, who now advises Corbyn, has said he suspects he and Labour had been targeted by “the manoeuvrings of what is now called the ‘deep state’”.
Related: If Labour is serious about power it must back a people’s vote on Brexit | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...UN’s cultural agency recognises the ‘world significance’ of the Animal Farm author’s papers
The personal archives of George Orwell, containing the author and journalist’s first phrasing of the sinister slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four, “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”, have been added to Unesco’s register of the world’s most significant documents.
The Memory of the World register is the archival equivalent of Unesco’s world heritage sites, listing unique historical documents from the Diary of Anne Frank to Magna Carta, with the intention that they be “fully preserved and protected for all”. University College London, which houses the manuscript notebooks, diaries, letters and photographs that make up the Orwell papers, said it underwent a highly competitive selection process to win a place on the list, and that Unesco’s selectors had recognised the “world significance and outstanding universal value” of Orwell’s writings.
Related: George Orwell’s idea of a better England is stirring again today | Fintan O’Toole
Continue reading...Chair of judges Bidisha pays tribute to collection Don’t Call Us Dead’s ‘passionate and very contemporary’ verse
The 29-year-old African American poet Danez Smith has beaten writers including the US poet laureate to become the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Forward prize for best poetry collection – and the first winner to identify as gender-neutral.
Smith, who prefers the pronoun “they”, confronts race, police brutality and gender in their collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, as well as their HIV-positive diagnosis. In its opening sequence, “summer, somewhere”, Smith imagines an afterlife for black men shot dead by the police. In “dear white America”, a poem that went viral on Youtube, Smith writes: “i can’t stand your ground. i’m sick of calling your recklessness the law. each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave.”
Related: ‘Every poem is political’: Danez Smith, the YouTube star shaking up poetry
Continue reading...‘Women are encouraged all the time to be terribly, terribly frightened,’ author tells Q&A
Germaine Greer compared the trauma of rape victims to her fear of huntsman spiders on Monday’s ABC Q&A program, eliciting more controversy as she defended her status a feminist.
Her appearance on the episode was itself deemed worthy of debate. Australia’s public broadcaster had to defend its invitation to the author after she was “de-platformed” from a series of public events, including the Brisbane writer’s festival.
Germaine Greer on debate, bullying, and being no-platformed #QandA pic.twitter.com/iiQg3YAGch
What can be done about people who claim ignorance as a justification for racism? #QandA pic.twitter.com/nSrel0ckb5
Continue reading...Meghan Markle proposed the charity cookbook during visit to communal kitchen after fire
The Duchess of Sussex has chosen a charity cookbook helping families affected by the Grenfell Tower fire as her first solo project since joining the royal family.
The duchess, 37, is championing Together: Our Community Cookbook, showcasing more than 50 recipes from women from the Grenfell community to celebrate the power of cooking in bringing people together.
Continue reading...The novelist had been shortlisted for Swedish award running in place of scandal-hit honour, but says he wishes to concentrate on writing instead
The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has withdrawn from Sweden’s alternative to the Nobel prize for literature, citing a wish to concentrate on his writing.
Established in the wake of the sexual assault scandal that led to the postponement of this year’s literature prize, the New Academy Prize set out to be a “reminder that literature should be associated with democracy, openness, empathy and respect”. Backed by more than 100 Swedish cultural figures, it shortlisted four authors for the award, with Murakami up against the British fantasy author Neil Gaiman, Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé and the Vietnam-born Canadian author Kim Thúy. The intention was that an expert jury would announce their winner in October.
Related: The Alternative Nobel: vote opens for a surprising new literature prize
Continue reading...To mark three decades since Roald Dahl’s heroine first appeared, her illustrator, Quentin Blake, has imagined her life now
She was the quintessential young rebel who broke all the rules about how good little girls should be portrayed in children’s literature by standing up to bullies in the name of justice – and having a laugh at the same time.
Continue reading...Ian McEwan is among campaigners objecting to plans for a 17.5-metre tower
Its monks left more than a century ago but the whitewashed stone walls of the monastery in Capel-y-ffin stand proud. Outside, a large, well-preserved statue of the Virgin Mary welcomes visitors to the venerable Victorian building, which has now been converted into self-catering apartments in great demand when the crowds flock to nearby Hay-on-Wye for its celebrated literary festival.
Since the monks’ departure, little has changed in this picturesque Welsh hamlet of a few houses, a chapel and a scattering of farms. Nestling in the foothills of the Black Mountains, it is a place of moss and bracken, stone walls and brooks, and has the lingering solemnity of an untended churchyard.
Continue reading...From Haruki Murakami to Michelle Obama, what to read this season
Continue reading...Booksellers refuse to ‘jump into the wolf’s mouth’ and order Marco Koskas’ Renaudot-longlisted novel online
French booksellers have called on literary judges to “defend books and not those who threaten them”, after one of France’s most prestigious prizes selected a self-published novel available only via Amazon.
Among the 17 titles in contention for this year’s Prix Renaudot is Marco Koskas’ Bande de Français, which was self-published on Amazon’s CreateSpace platform. According to the Syndicat de la librairie française, which represents French booksellers, the jury have put them in an impossible position.
They're turning against Amazon ... That makes no sense
Continue reading...No space for male authors in race for £15,000 award, whose entries are judged blind
For the fifth time in 13 years, the final contenders for the BBC national short story award are all women.
The five-strong shortlist pits former winner Sarah Hall against the composer Kerry Andrew and new names Kiare Ladner, Ingrid Persaud and Nell Stevens in competition for the £15,000 prize. All five stories will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 ahead of the final decision. Almost 800 entries were submitted for the award, which is run in partnership with Cambridge University and judged entirely blind – selectors know neither the name nor gender of the authors they read.
Continue reading...Free speech campaigners say letters sent to booksellers are attempt to ‘short-circuit legal process’
LLondon-based libel lawyers representing a playboy financier have sent threatening letters to bookshops around the world in an attempt to block distribution of a new book detailing his alleged involvement in one of the biggest financial scandals in history.
Free speech campaigners said the decision to threaten a book’s distributors rather than the publisher or author could be seen as an attempt to “short-circuit the legal process” around libel law and risks setting a precedent that would intimidate booksellers.
Been sent two threatening emails and a threatening letter saying that if we sell a certain book we will be sued for defamation. Surely that’s a publisher/author issue not a bookseller issue?
Continue reading...The veteran Washington reporter’s unflattering portrait of Trump White House gets ninth printing to meet extraordinary demand from US and beyond
Donald Trump may have dismissed Bob Woodward’s Fear as “a joke”, but readers are showing themselves to be keen to share in the comedy, with more than 750,000 copies of the White House exposé sold in American in just one day, according to its publisher.
Fear, which “depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner’s manual”, according to a review in the Guardian, was published on 11 September. Simon & Schuster said yesterday that it sold a combined total of more than 750,000 copies of the book on its first day on sale in the US. The publisher has now ordered a ninth printing, bringing the total number of hardbacks in print in America to more than 1.15m.
Related: Fear review: Bob Woodward's dragnet descends on Donald Trump
Continue reading...Swimmer of Yangtze beat 300 others to win the £1,000 award set up by the Guardian and 4th Estate in 2015
Chinese Canadian writer Yiming Mahas won the Guardian 4th Estate short story prize. Ma’s Swimmer of Yangtze provides a brutal insight into the rise and fall of community heroes.
The story follows the disabled son of a tailor, a boy from a humble, nameless village near Wuhan in Cultural Revolution-era China, as he becomes an unlikely Paralympian hero. Told from the perspective of a village elder, it leads the reader on a journey of hope and sorrow.
Continue reading...Era-hopping sex, trauma and therapy … four scientists make a world-changing discovery in a novel that breaks the rules of detective fiction, space and time
A door bolted from the inside, blood, bullets and and unidentifiable corpse. These are the classic ingredients of the locked-room mystery, but when Kate Mascarenhas deploys them in her genre-defying debut, she doesn’t play by the rules of detective fiction, or even the rules of space and time. As the novel opens, we learn that time travel was invented in 1967 by a four-strong group known as the Pioneers. There’s aristocratic cosmologist Margaret; Lucille, who has “come from the Toxteth slums to make radio waves travel faster than light”; enigmatic Grace, “an expert in the behaviour of matter”; and Barbara, a specialist in nuclear fission.
Their discovery is, of course, world-changing, but only some of them will get to share in it. Time travel throws Barbara into a manic-depressive episode, and while the other Pioneers form an organisation called the Conclave to oversee the technology, she is frozen out. Meanwhile, in 2018, student Odette is discovering the mysterious corpse, which leaves her shaken and desperate for an explanation. And in 2017, trauma counsellor Ruby Rebello is learning more about the history of her Granny Bee (for Barbara), and how the Conclave is entwined in their family’s fate.
Trauma here is a kind of time travel, compelling the sufferer to return again and again to the scene of their shock
Continue reading...Owner avoids having to close Bookends in Cardigan by raffling it off to customers who spent more than £20
The UK’s newest independent bookseller is gearing up to open his doors – after winning a bookshop in a raffle.
The unusual prize was dreamed up by Paul Morris, who opened Bookends in Cardigan four years ago. The shop is profitable and would have made an estimated £30,000 in a sale, but Morris said he wanted to give someone else the chance to realise their dream of running a bookshop. Over the last three months, anyone who spent more than £20 was eligible to be entered into a raffle to win it.
Related: Best job in the world? Luxury resort in Maldives seeks bookseller
Continue reading...President tweets that he will correct record, saying he is misrepresented in veteran reporter’s upcoming book, Fear
Donald Trump has promised to “write the real book” on his presidency, to correct a record he says is misrepresented by Bob Woodward, veteran author of a highly anticipated work, Fear, that will be published on Tuesday.
Related: Fear review: Bob Woodward's dragnet descends on Donald Trump
Related: 'It's all fake': in Trump's heartland, talk of White House chaos rings hollow
Continue reading...A Scottish grandmother’s reading of the 2009 children’s book to her grandson has seen demand for it skyrocket around the world
A home video of a Scottish grandmother’s uncontrollable giggles while reading The Wonky Donkey picture book to her baby grandson have sent book lovers around the world rushing to get their hands on a copy, with publishers left scrambling to meet demand.
New Zealander Craig Smith’s children’s book, based on Smith’s song of the same name, tells of a three-legged – or wonky – donkey, adding a new adjective every few pages until it ends with a “spunky, hanky-panky cranky stinky dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey”. In a recent video made by her daughter, Scottish granny Janice Clark reads the story to her four-month-old grandson Archer, and laughs progressively harder as the donkey becomes increasingly bizarre. “Oh dear, how can anybody read this seriously,” says Clark. “This is going to kill me.” The video has been viewed more than 3m times in the last week.
Continue reading...How to Be Invisible, a collection of lyrics from across the singer’s 40-year career, will be released in December through Faber & Faber
She is famous for incorporating the work of Emily Brontë, James Joyce and Grimm’s fairytales into her work: now Kate Bush will publish her first book, a collection of lyrics from across her 40-year career.
Faber & Faber will release How to Be Invisible: Selected Lyrics on 6 December, with a comprehensive introduction from the novelist David Mitchell. Mitchell, who has described Bush as his “hero”, wrote three spoken-word sections of Bush’s 2014 Before the Dawn performances – which marked her first live shows in 35 years.
Related: Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! 60 unbelievable facts about Kate Bush
Continue reading...A new edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray, featuring handwritten notation from Oscar Wilde, reveals the extent to which the writer grappled with how much homoerotic content he should include in his novel.
It is the first time the original manuscript in Wilde’s own writing has been published and demonstrates how he self-censored some of the most romantic paragraphs. He tones down the more overt references to the homoerotic nature of Basil Hallward’s relationship with Dorian, crossing out his confession that “the world becomes young to me when I hold his hand”.
Wilde's purpose was to break out of what Lady Bracknell called the ‘three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality'
Related: Likely identity of Oscar Wilde’s American sweetheart ‘Hattie’ uncovered
Continue reading...Pilgrim Spy – published under pseudonym Tom Shore – also claims a ‘third generation’ Baader-Meinhof gang came close to halting the fall of the Berlin Wall
A terrorist plot to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev in East Germany in 1989 has been revealed in print by the SAS soldier who claims to have thwarted it.
Tom Shore – a pseudonym – was sent into East Germany by British security services in 1989 on a mission to uncover details of what was believed to be a Soviet military operation. He found no such evidence, but while undercover he made contact with a movement working for reform and democracy in Leipzig.
“Then there were the home-grown terrorists, like the German Baader-Meinhof Group – otherwise known as the ‘Red Army Faction [or] RAF’… The group is often talked about in terms of generations. The ‘first generation’ consisted of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and others. The ‘second generation’ came about after the majority of the first generation was arrested in 1972. The ‘third generation’ RAF existed in the 1980s, 1990s and up to 1998.”
Related: Neal Ascherson on how terrorist collective Baader-Meinhof terrorised West Germany in the Seventies
Continue reading...Gwyn Conger Steinbeck’s newly unearthed book tells of troubled marriage to author
John Steinbeck’s wife Gwyn Conger Steinbeck describes the author as “a sadistic man” and a serial womaniser, in a newly unearthed memoir found in Wales that is set to be published for the first time this week.
The manuscript for My Life With John Steinbeck, by the author’s second wife and mother of his two children, has been in Montgomery, Powys ever since its ghostwriter, the British journalist Douglas Brown, died on holiday in Yorkshire in the 1990s. The manuscript was passed to Brown’s brother in Montgomery and was recently discovered by his neighbour Bruce Lawton, who is publishing it.
Continue reading...Salvation by Peter F Hamilton; Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce; Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente; Early Riser by Jasper Fforde; and Supercute Futures by Martin Millar
It’s not hard to work out why Peter F Hamilton’s books are bestsellers: he writes long, complex, absorbing novels crammed with cutting-edge ideas and multiple storylines and utilises a number of popular sub-genres to great effect. What we have in Salvation (Macmillan, £20), the first in a new series, is an investigation into a crashed alien starship, corporate and political intrigue, espionage, murder mystery and a far-future war story. When the ship is discovered at the edge of human space, the authorities send an undercover team to investigate the vessel and its mysterious contents. What follows is the revelation of what they find, the complicated backstories of the principal investigators and their tangled personal and political motivations, and a superbly atmospheric series of flash-forwards to a war between an army of genetically modified humans and an implacable alien race bent on the annihilation of humankind. Salvation Lost is due out next year.
Continue reading...Takeover will make business better able to ‘champion pleasures of real bookshops’
Waterstones is buying the historic family-owned book chain Foyles in a surprise deal.
James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, made a pointed reference to the competitive threat of Amazon as he announced the deal. He said the takeover would make it better able to “champion the pleasures of real bookshops in the face of Amazon’s siren call”.
Continue reading...Building was not insured, the museum’s deputy director said, but some pieces survived including the Bendegó meteorite
As much as 90% of the collection at Brazil’s National Museum was destroyed in a devastating fire on Sunday and – compounding the disaster – the building was not insured, according to the museum’s deputy director.
Some pieces survived, including the famous Bendegó meteorite and a library of 500,000 books – including works dating back to the days of the Portuguese empire – which was kept in a separate annex, Cristiana Serejo told reporters in front of the building’s blackened shell.
Related: Brazil National Museum blaze in Rio blamed on austerity
Related: Brazil's national museum: what could be lost in the fire?
Continue reading...Joyce Maynard, now 65, has published a new essay that asks if the #MeToo movement will allow her to tell her side of the story
Joyce Maynard, who was wooed as a teenager by the late JD Salinger, has spoken out about how the literary world condemned her as “a predator”.
Maynard was 18 when an essay of hers was published in the New York Times, along with a photograph. The piece led the then 53-year-old Salinger to contact her and, as Maynard writes in the New York Times, urged her to “to leave college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this) his partner forever”.
Continue reading...Jared Kushner claims boss lacks cash and Melania Trump refuses to defend her husband in a tale of infighting and confusion
Before Donald Trump ran for president, he needed to build his political vocabulary. And so it was in an early meeting with Steve Bannon – in 2010, when Trump was considering a presidential run to unseat Barack Obama – that Trump encountered the concept of populism.
In a scene captured in the journalist Bob Woodward’s new book Fear: Trump in the White House, Bannon told Trump that he (meaning Trump) was for the common man, against crony capitalism and insider deals.
Related: Trump dismisses Bob Woodward’s book: ‘Lies and phony sources’
Related: Top Trump aide: White House 'resistance' explored removing president from office
Continue reading...President tweets that Fear, Woodward’s portrayal of a chaotic and dysfunctional White House, is a ‘con of the public’
Donald Trump has dismissed a highly critical book on his presidency by the respected investigative journalist Bob Woodward as a politically motivated “con of the public”.
Woodward, one of the journalists who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, portrays the Trump White House as chaotic and dysfunctional in his new book, Fear.
Related: Bob Woodward's book details Trump's chaotic and dysfunctional White House
Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?
The Woodward book has already been refuted and discredited by General (Secretary of Defense) James Mattis and General (Chief of Staff) John Kelly. Their quotes were made up frauds, a con on the public. Likewise other stories and quotes. Woodward is a Dem operative? Notice timing?
The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and “a dumb southerner.” I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!
Continue reading...Abdellah Taïa and other prominent names have said that horrifying details show their country ‘still hates women and considers them as nothing’
A group of prominent Moroccan authors led by the writer and film director Abdellah Taïa has called on the country’s government to stop “cling[ing] to obsolete values that are killing our children” following the “unspeakable” alleged gang rape and torture of a teenage girl.
Related: Twelve men arrested over alleged abduction and rape of Moroccan girl
Continue reading...Best known as the model for Millais’ much loved Ophelia painting, a new book hopes to foreground her own work as a poet
Her pale face floating amongst the reeds, Elizabeth Siddall is best remembered as the pre-Raphaelite muse depicted as Ophelia by John Everett Millais, and as the wife and muse of artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But the 19th-century icon was a poet in her own right, and her haunting writing is set to be published for the first time in accord with her original manuscripts, more than 150 years after her death.
Siddall was “discovered” in 1849 while working in a milliners’ shop, aged around 20, by the artist Walter Deverell. Deverell introduced her to the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and she sat as a model for various members of the group, including Rossetti, whom she would later marry. She became an artist herself, with John Ruskin as her patron, but suffered from continuous ill health, enduring a still birth and a later miscarriage before taking an overdose of laudanum and dying at home in 1862. The grieving Rossetti buried many of his own unpublished poems along with her body, later exhuming her so he could recover them.
I care not for my Ladys soul
Though I worship before her smile
I care not wheres my Ladys goal
When her beauty shall [lose its wile]
Jodie Whittaker version to join series that merges sci-fi and childhood favourites
The casting of Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor Who has not just transformed a Time Lord into a Time Lady, but has also seemingly regenerated a Mr Man into a Little Miss.
Penguin Random House has announced that later this year Dr Thirteenth will join its range of stories that mashup the world of the Mr Men with the universe of Doctor Who.
Related: Topsy-turvy: how Mr Men got mashed up with Doctor Who
Continue reading...Fear is based on hundreds of hours of conversations with key players according to the author, who uncovered the Watergate scandal
The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, was so incensed by the behavior of Donald Trump that he privately described the president to other aides as an “idiot” and complained that they were in “Crazytown”, according to an incendiary new account of Trump’s presidency.
The unflattering portrait of Trump’s White House, in which the president is portrayed as being so gripped by paranoia over the ongoing Russian investigation that he is barely able to operate, is contained in Fear, the much-awaited book by Bob Woodward. A copy of the book was obtained days before its official release, by the Washington Post, which reported on several of its most arresting details on Tuesday.
Related: Woodward and Bernstein: Watergate echoes loud in Donald Trump era
Continue reading...Award-winning Catalan producer to turn Nancy Johnstone’s account of running a hotel amid war into English-language film
Related: Barcelona and the Spanish civil war
Related: Eighty years on, Spain may at last be able to confront the ghosts of civil war
Related: UK artist carves a tribute to Spain’s civil war heroes
The relief work depended on what help the British government cared to give. Voluntary organisations were drained. But one organisation was still going strong.
A contingent of plus-four clad gentlemen arrived from England to shoot painlessly the wandering, starving Spanish mules. It seemed a pity that they did not first shoot painlessly the cooped-up, starving Spanish refugees.
Continue reading...Magda Szubanski is flawless, bubble baths are trite, it’s cool to be buried in a cardboard box, and everyone has an opinion on the MWF
Ronan Farrow is so articulate, ambitious and self-possessed at barely 30 years old that he came across as almost slick in his keynote address on the #MeToo movement, which his reporting in the New Yorker helped to spark.
Related: Chelsea Manning, Ronan Farrow and Ta-Nehisi Coates on terror and bravery at Antidote
Related: Good inking: the novel rise of literary tattoos
This @MelbWritersFest is also the first writers festival where I haven't been on a panel about "diversity" and could just talk about my writing, my collaborative work, the writers I love—all the good stuff, and not just how I present. That's thanks to @mariekehardy.
Related: Australia still has time to avoid the worst, says Alt-America author David Neiwert
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