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~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, May 23rd 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 16th 2012
 
Hard to think of a better example of two books squeezed into one than "Dial M for Murdoch", published last month, a fascinating account of the hacking scandal and the cover-up at News International. The book has two authors—the Independent's Martin Hickman and the Labour MP Tom Watson—and both make appearances in the book, where each is referred to in the third person. But there's a big difference: Hickman is an observer and Watson is a main character.
 
For most of the book, the tone is what you would expect: good clear reporting, the facts—shocking as they are—presented in a reasonably detached fashion. But every now and then, "Tom Watson" makes an appearance in the story and the tone can suddenly veer off. We hear about some of his thought processes as if he were a character in a novel and this leads, inevitably in this context, to moments of bathos. We learn for instance that Watson "watched every episode of the American detective series 'The Wire' and decided to follow the advice of one of its characters". (This was the moment the detective Lester Freamon, played by Clarke Peters, repeated Deepthroat's line: "Follow the money.") The quality of the information changes too. We get the little details that thriller writers like to use to locate characters. "At 10am the next day, as he drank black coffee at the Fire Station in Waterloo, Tom Watson was called by Ed Miliband's office..."
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~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 15th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, May 11th 2012

“Writing Britain”, which opens today at the British Library, traces how writers from Chaucer to Zadie Smith have used the British landscape—from its rolling dales and hills to its inner-city tower blocks—in their work. With over 100 items from the library itself, and others on loan from America or other parts of Britain, it is not lacking in jewels. There is a delicately-wrought manuscript of "The Canterbury Tales", an original illustration from Tolkein's "The Hobbit", a psychedelic cartoon of "Alice in Wonderland" by Ralph Steadman and the wonderfully pulp-like cover of Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". 

But the real gems are the manuscripts. Looking at these exhibits—from Laurie Lee's draft of "Cider with Rosie" written on the back of a BBC script to a list by W.H. Auden of his favourite names of lead mines in Derbyshire—another theme emerges, which brings these authors even closer: their handwriting. The only manuscripts on display by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot show them writing in clear, straight, evenly spaced copperplate, Eliot's few markings and changes as coolly confident as the progress of "Middlemarch". Looking at the handwriting of these two women, they suddenly seem unshakable, and you can understand how they took on the whole host of male Victorian writers.  read more »

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, May 4th 2012

Watching “The Bridge”, the latest offering of Scandinavian noir to reach our TV screens, makes me feel hopeful—despite the increasingly dark deeds of the criminal mastermind who's keeping the police of Copenhagen and Malmö on their toes. That's because of our heroine, Saga Noren. She has the white-blonde good looks of a Swedish ice queen and an unusual brain under all that hair. Saga can’t read social signals, can't relate emotionally to other people, and takes everything literally, at face value. In short, she is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. "I don't think she knows she has Aspergers", the actress Sofia Helin, who plays her so convincingly, told Time Out. "The writer Hans [Rosenfeldt] was very precise about this. She just thinks she's odd". Label or not, she makes Sara Lund in "The Killing" just look mildly workaholic.   read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 2nd 2012
 
The pictures could be taken by aliens. When you walk into "Transmission", the current exhibition at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London, it's not immediately clear what you are looking at. The images on the wall, hung without labels or titles, are uncannily familiar: landscapes, often captured from high altitude; networks of crevasses and fissures, mountain ranges and isolated craters. We've seen things like this before in photographs of the lunar surface or pictures sent back by rovers on Mars. But you are in fact looking at some of the most photographed places on the planet: the Yosemite national park, the Grand Canyon and Mount St Helens.
 
Dan Holdsworth is a photographer, but this isn't quite photography, or at least not quite as we know it. He made the pictures out of data, captured by the United States Geological Survey using satellites in space, which make laser scans of the Earth's surface and take coordinates every few metres, which Holdsworth then renders digitally. In the centre of the room is a stack of more than 6,000 sheets of paper, more than a foot tall, printed with nearly 5m coordinate points in neat columns. They represent 0.23 square metres of the print of Yosemite Valley on the wall.  
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~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, April 3rd 2012

Thanks to “The King’s Speech”, and particularly to Geoffrey Rush, we’re all familiar with Lionel Logue—the tough-minded but compassionate Australian speech therapist who helped George VI to overcome his stammer. But when did Colin Firth (aka George VI) first acquire that stammer, and who taught him? Interviewed after the release of the film in 2010, he paid tribute to voice coach Neil Swain. But actually Firth was stammering confidently years before “The King’s Speech” was ever conceived.

Recently, I watched the DVD of “A Month in the Country”, the 1987 adaptation of J.L. Carr’s novel about a shell-shocked soldier returning from the Western Front to spend a long, hot summer in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. Directed by Pat O’Connor—who’s just completed a film of Michael Morpurgo’s “Private Peaceful”, to be released later this year—it seems to have slipped from most people’s consciousness. 

I’d remembered only the barest outlines of the plot: that the veteran, Tom Birkin (Firth), sets to work restoring a medieval mural in the village church, and that in doing so he reaches a psychological truce with the horrors he’s witnessed. I’d half forgotten that he befriends another veteran, played by Kenneth Branagh (almost absurdly youthful-looking, fair and fresh-faced as a choir boy); and I’d completely forgotten that Birkin’s shell shock manifests itself in a crippling stammer.   read more »

~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, March 28th 2012

I can’t be the only one who’s reacted with a sinking (sorry!) feeling to the Titanic centenary. Surely we’re already familiar with the most shocking and thrilling details of the tragedy—how Captain Smith was ordered to go full steam ahead amidst the icebergs; how the ship had too few lifeboats to accommodate even half her passengers; how some behaved like heroes, others like cads; how the band kept playing. Surely there’s nothing more to learn.

So I was surprised to come away from this month’s meeting at the Royal Society of Literature—a discussion between Richard Davenport-Hines, author of “Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew”, and Frances Wilson, author of “How to Survive the Titanic, or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay”—with a magpie collection of gems that were entirely new to me.

The story of the Philadelphia millionaire Billy Carter, for example. He boarded the Titanic with 60 shirts, 15 pairs of shoes, two sets of tails, 24 polo sticks, a new Renault and two dogs. His reaction, when he realised she was sinking, was to put his head round the door of the family suite and bark at his wife to dress herself and the children, before scarpering to grab himself a place in an early lifeboat. They met again at eight o’clock the following morning, aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia. “All he said,” his wife testified during their divorce, “was that he’d had a jolly good breakfast, and never thought I would make it.”  read more »

~ Posted by Simon Willis, March 23rd 2012

On Wednesday evening Enitharmon Press, a small independent publisher, celebrated its 45th birthday at the Southbank Centre in London. It's rare for presses like Enitharmon to get a moment in the spotlight, and the draw for the audience, which filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall, was the poets who were reading—the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Helen Dunmore, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. But the evening was a reminder that some of the most interesting work in publishing is done by small presses.

Last year, for instance, Enitharmon published "Clavics" by Geoffrey Hill—arguably Britain's foremost living poet—a collection of poems that used elaborate verse forms, making patterns with his rigorously varied line-lengths. As Hill explained to my colleague Emma Hogan, when she was researching an interview for The Economist online: 

"The layout on the page is highly intricate...It really is designed for the old-fashioned hand-set typography. It so happened that the press was looking for a poet with an elaborate text and I was looking at the same time for a publisher who was willing and able to set an elaborate text, and by sheer chance we found each other."    read more »

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~ Posted by Robert Butler, March 15th 2012

The trends manager at YouTube, Kevin Allocca, gave a TED talk recently on the three factors that make videos go viral: one was “tastemakers”, another was a “communities of participation” and the third was “unexpectedness”. But the bit of the talk that caught my attention was his opening remark. He told his young audience, "We all want to be stars, celebrities, singers, comedians." Not "most of us", or "some of us", but "we all".

Allocca is not alone in generalising about the public. The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, says in his new book, "It seems as if virtually everyone in America dreams of starting a business". Well, except for the ones who want to be doctors, teachers, musicians, diplomats, judges, actors, full-time parents, even bloggers.   read more »