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 JEWISH BOOK WEEK - 2008 |
The faces change, but it's the same old buzz
Comparing today’s East End with that of yesteryear, Bernard Kops, Monica Ali and Oona King discuss how that special migrant spirit survives.
STAND in the middle of the road and close your eyes, says playwright Bernard Kops ...> more |
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An insight into the Knights' club - THE Most Reverend and Rt Hon Rowan Williams may wish he had never made his comments on sharia but, though...>more
The explosion of new industry - AN ear-piercing screech split the air as the projectile flew upwards. It landed with a crash at the foot of the Highgate garden ...>more
Photo-chronicler of Israel - In 2004, the year of David Rubinger’s 80th birthday, his life was ripped apart by violence. He found the body of his partner ...>more
Is there no end to the vortex of decadence?- WE live in decadent days. Or do we?
* If decadence is defined as a lowering of morality or civilised culture, then...>more
Books sold to order (at knockdown prices) - IT may not be Waterstone’s, but for sheer interest and variety, book-lovers have chosen Jon Privett’s secondhand ...>more
One bard’s open letter to the Poets on the Underground triumvirate - DEAR Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert, I jumped with joy when I first ...>more
A scary story, but will the NHS listen to it? - THERE must have been occasions during Colin Ludlow’s hospital odyssey through bowel cancer and countless ...>more
Chancing upon a historical gem - TRACKING down family histories has become a popular pastime, with a boom in resources available on the internet and popular ...>more
Journey to a world beyond time - READING India Russell’s new collection of poems is like walking through a large and rather overgrown garden, full of ...>more
Politics, power and the making of modern Italy - IN The Force of Destiny, a title taken from Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino, Christopher Duggan concentrates...>more
The secret firebrand in Burns- SADLY, Robert Burns is marketed and branded down to the last penny. When the author Andrew O’Hagan interviewed a ...>more
An African Othello who shook the West End - IF the critics are to be believed, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello – currently at the Donmar Warehouse – is incandescent...>more
A writer who shaped the modern world - BY any standards, John Stuart Mill was a major figure in Victorian Britain and a significant influence on the development of ...>more
White heart in the right place - FOOTBALL fans are a sentimental lot, and perhaps Spurs fans are more misty-eyed than most. We go gooey at almost anything. It’s ...>more
Delicious wit and English charm - THERE has been a flurry of excited adulation around the publication of Diana Athill’s new book. Part of it is due to the fact that ...>more
The danger and daring of Larry - WE crowded in behind what was then the courtyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields for the start of a unique protest march. > more
Glass puts serial novel back in frame - READING of an adventure is much more respectable than having one,” the first instalment of GW Dahlquist’s 10-part ode... > more
Camden’s literary goldmine, but look who they left out - LISTS can be a mania. Yet they are created for our edification – and for fun. And what they don’t say can be... > more
How Fee dumped Tod by txt - ANDY Croft’s handicraft is stretched to the limit in this ambitious project – to produce a novel based on Hamlet, entirely in verse... > more
Did fiction lay the path for science? - SCIENCE fiction has always been serious literature’s unwanted brother. > more
An accidental path to stardom - TIME passes quickly when you’re talking with actress Miriam Karlin. > more
The Bard’s bent for bawdiness - IN 1598 William Shakespeare bought New Place, the best house in his native town of Stratford-upon-Avon. > more
The sole dread of folly - THEY used to meet on a quiet afternoon in a coffee shop in Flask Walk, Hampstead, run by a retired Spanish matador, and sit around drawing... > more
Won over by an idiot who’s interesting - MAYBE I wasn’t perhaps the best person to review the Russell Brand autobiography, My Booky Wook. > more
The gate to political wisdom - GERTRUDE Himmelfarb is an 87-year-old American ex- Trotskyite who is steeped in English literature and writes with an... > more
Things that go bump backstage - LONDON'S Theatreland is supposedly riddled with ghosts; the ubiquitous grey man; the restless spirit of a forgotten understudy... > more
When the Heath had a duel purpose - DAWN, a frosty Christmas Eve morning, December 1839: leaf-less trees stand quiet against an overcast sky. The pair wait... > more
Carving out science in Elizabethan London - THE best viewing platform to see a contemporary Tower of Babel from the temples of Mammon... > more
Capital crime and punishment - SAMUEL Johnson observed there was “in London all that life can afford”; a charming slogan which Geoffrey Howse’s... > more
Portrait of the poet as a young man - THERE is no doubt that Ezra Pound was one of the most important poets of the 20th century. > more
Terribly house and garden at number 7b - IT was in the 1950s that Michael Flanders and Donald Swann sang that “The garden’s full of furniture / And the... > more
Rumpole and the Casanova casebook - HE gave us Rum pole, that old rogue of a lawyer that millions of TV viewers fell in love with, because Rumpole... > more
Within these walls - FORGET your castles and palaces full of antiquities – when it comes to finding out how people really lived, you can’t beat looking over... > more
A new inspector calls – in Ireland - EVEN by the standards of crime novels, Paul Charles’s latest offering, The Dust of Death, has a gruesome opening. A Donegal...>more
The tenderness of wolves - INTERVIEWED Ted Hughes at length in 1965 in The Queens pub on the corner of Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill. It was just two years ...>more
Why poetry was shelved for publishing - NOVELIST Dame Beryl Bainbridge has regrets that make you want to cry. She hates the way she treated her mother, Winnie...>more
Return of Rachel, 25 years on - RACHEL Waring is one of the oddest characters to grace contemporary literature. But author Stephen Benatar, whose novel Wish Her ...>more
Whitehorn’s memories are a woman’s own - THE title of Kath arine Whitehorn’s book comes from a quotation by Jim Fiebig, the American gemstone jeweller. And it ..>more
Death of honest politics? - WHEN a young, highly talented and prolific political journalist falls seriously out of love with his favoured subject it must be cause for..>more
Has our great train network gone off track? - CAPITALIST free market buccaneers of the 19th cen tury would have blushed at today’s “botched” free-for-all privatisation... > more
Dyspeptic observations from a tripper to the Hebrides - AN unusual product of the MacNeice centenary is the reissue, almost 70 years after its first publication... > more
After 40 years, we’re still on Radio 4’s wavelength - REVOLUTION and counter-revolution, baronial struggles, regional discontent, suicides and palace coups... > more
Freud for thought - MENTION Sigmund Freud and the image most of us have of the father of psychoanalysis is of a stern, serious-faced man with a beard, something... > more
A poet’s life after a loved one’s death - WHEN Dannie Abse lost his wife in a horrific car crash two years ago, the future looked bleak. > more
Home truths on wanderlust - Watch out for Michael Palin next time you are on Hampstead Heath. He won’t be jogging up Parliament Hill, as he used to do from his... > more
Stars and Stripes are flagging - IN common parlance, Eurasia is the land mass straddling Europe and Asia. > more
A dark history of crime in Soho - AUTHOR Paul Willetts’ biography of the Soho novelist and raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross was many literary critics’ book of the year...>more
‘Demise of unions has set us back to 19th century’ - WORKERS of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your bling (elaborate and highly ostentatious jewellery ...>more
‘Lady Macbeth Cherie,’ flirty first lady of Downing Street - OVERSHADOWED by the massive publicity surrounding the launch of Alastair Campbell’s diaries of ...>more
Tribute to Heath-Stubbs - NINE months after the death of the blind poet John Heath-Stubbs, a host of celebrated poets will congregate in St James’s Church... > more
How the young Joe went from peasant to Lenin’s fixer - STALIN, like Hitler, was an outsider. Born December 17 1877 as Josef Vissarionovitch Djugushvili... > more
An alternative agenda for Brown? - I’M at last convinced that history marches backward.In the 1880s the future Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli wrote... > more
The Guantanamo allotment – a distraction from torture - FOR a guy who has had razor blades taken to his penis for five months he retains a fantastic sense of ...>more
Women stay true to the ideals of the beautiful game - EVER dreamed you played for England? I have: about 600 times. Let me tell you, it was exhausting. Every ...>more
Red hot object of desire - Alan Bate' s Women in Love (1969) – a cinematic exercise, viewed by some as homo-eroticism, which still sexually disturbs...>more
Anger that lost its focus - COLIN Wilson an nounced in his early teens that he was a genius and has consistently insisted that to be true. Nevertheless, the ...>more
Poor sell: organism that’s to die for - MITOCHONDRIA are small components in our cells and there may be hundreds in each cell. Their function is to provide the ...>more
Poems for the child that lies within - MIMI Khalvati was born in Tehran, grew up on the Isle of Wight, and trained at the Drama Centre in Kentish Town. She is a well-loved...>more
Jewel in the crown of the last White Rajah - IT is not generally realised that the British Empire was at its greatest extent after the Second World War... > more
Heavy tread into virgin territory - THIS is half a book, and a remarkable novella as such – one that examines in detail all the elements of love and lust on a honey moon ...>more
In search of strangers - THE novelist Evelyn Waugh once created a fictional young woman prone to travel, who would send back cryptic postcards from exotic places. ...>more
Thoughts for the day on a brave bishop - HERE are many paradoxes that lie unsolved in this insightful biography of Richard Harries, the recently retired ...>more
A half life lost inside the Shelley closed circle - POOR Fanny Wollstonecraft. We don’t even know what she looked like; only the off-hand remarks... > more
Letters from a poet’s heart - HE was small, modest, shy, the apologetic son of pathetically poor immigrants from Lithuania. The handful of books about... > more
Inside the mind of a lyrical iconoclast - LEAVING Shakespeare out we must sometimes ask: “Who is the greatest English poet?” In considering... > more
It was the best of times and the worst of times - CHRISTOPHER Barker is the son of the writer Elizabeth Smart and the notorious poet, George Barker... > more
The ‘celebrities’ who went back for more - WHAT is it that makes people so brilliantly brave and oblivious of danger when their country is engulfed by war... > more
Sixty, and still single - ON August 15, India will celebrate the 60th anniversary of independence from Britain. To the surprise and satisfaction... > more
One man’s comedy of terrors - IS it journalism or stand-up? The political activist Mark Thomas’s show blurs the boundaries to great effect... > more
Step-by-step guide to making a movie - MAKING a movie was once an elitist, prohibitively expensive activity that the average person could only dream of... > more
Republican Foot, the admirer of the Queen - Vanessa, his terrier dog, regularly sat on the back seat of the chauffeur-driven car when Michael Foot left Whitehall... > more
Sir Sydney’s garden for the gardenless - THE party was a knees-up fit for the newly crowned king. Scantily clad satyrs danced around a fountain that had... > more
John Major’s ‘slush puppy for the very rich’ - PRIME ministers and cooking prove to be a recipe for disaster in Peter Gladwin’s entertaining new cookery book... > more
Thatcher’s children - AS someone who was a member of all Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinets, I was naturally fascinated to read Simon Jenkins’ book. > more
A pictorial history of St Joan’s theatre workshop - A BLEAK November day in 1953 in Stratford, east London, heralded a momentous day in the theatrical and... > more
Pick up a Penguin, or a Bob Dylan... - PETER Stothard is the former editor of The Times and the current editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He is also on the... > more
Michael’s fantasy island for kids and grown-ups - IT is perhaps not surprising to find one of our greatest children’s writers has shared his home with hundreds of... > more
The last of the fierce, individual history boys - THE last time I saw him he was hurrying down Hampstead Road looking more than ever like the White Rabbit in the... > more
Funnyman Griff’s journey to his past - IT is remarkable how objective history is, says Griff Rhys Jones. “It is an obvious point,” he says, “but one which really came... > more
The women who are far from veiled - IF you believe what you read then you probably imagine Arab women are quiet victims of oppressive, hopelessly... > more
Who’s ever heard of Mr Virginia Woolf? - THE only time I met the famous art critic Kenneth Clark (Lord Clark of Civilisation), he told me that for him there were... > more
The twelve days which shook Victor’s world - HUNGARY and Hampstead play a vital role in the life of Victor Sebestyen. It was in Budapest that he was born... > more
The enigma that was Katharine Hepburn - WE were sitting in the Californian sunshine, Spencer Tracy and I, in orange canvas chairs outside a Bel-Air mansion... > more
Send in the clowns – but no elephants - ONCE upon a time there was a circus, which had no performing animals apart from a duck who would quack to the sound... > more
Romeo and Juliet who fled the Nazis in a boat -
MICHAEL Arditti did not set out to write a parable. But his new novel A Sea Change is more than just a love story. > more
A true free spirit of the Middle East - BOMBS over Beirut, bullets across Baghdad: Abdelrahman Munif must be wailing in his grave. > more
Victorian masses and leisure principle - THE consumer society, says Judith Flanders, starts here. With the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was launched, to the... > more
The dutiful daughter of our greatest writer - SHE was the third child of ten, the second daughter of England’s greatest novelist and social campaigner... > more |
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