Graham Swift (Graham Swift – Literature) is a Booker Prize winning novelist. It was his novel ‘Last Orders’ that took the 1996 prize whilst also becoming the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. His novel Waterland (1983) won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both of these have been adapted for the screen, […]
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If perspicacity and foresightedness are criteria for the greatness of a narrative then ‘Fahrenheit 451‘ by Ray Bradbury (Ray Bradbury – Books, Short Stories & Quotes) stands tall. First published in 1953 the author imagines a dystopian future in which a totalitarian state has prohibited books and reading. The populace is driven into conformity by
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By 2024 it has been 71 years since the publication in 1953 of ‘The Adventures of Augie March‘ by Saul Bellow (Saul Bellow | US news | The Guardian). The book is still held up by many critics as a contender for the accolade of the great American novel. Augie March is Jewish in Chicago
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Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen-name Stendhal, wrote this novel at a pointless period in his life, during fifty-three days late in 1838. He was serving at the time as a minor French official in Italy – the Consul at Civitavecchia. Beyle was a veteran of several Napoleonic campaigns and was one of the survivors
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John and Laura Baxter are recovering from the death of their daughter Christine from meningitis in the 1950s when they take a trip to Venice. At a restaurant table they encounter a pair of Scottish spinster twins. One of these, Heather, is a seer and informs Laura that a little girl has been sitting alongside
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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/) was scornful of those who could not look at the fundamentals of the human situation squarely. By this he meant the pervasive presence of dissatisfactoriness, suffering and death. Instead, humans manufacture a myriad of avoidance techniques. His view was that if we dare to peer over the perimeter fence of our
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In a statement made in 1939 about what role the Soviet Union might play in The Second World War Winston Churchill said : “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key”. Eighty five years later the Western world
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In 2002 Sarah Waters (Sarah Waters | Hachette UK) offered us Fingersmith, a neo-Victorian novel. The setting is London, 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves – ‘fingersmiths’ – under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her ‘family’. But from the moment she draws breath, Sue’s fate is
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Ann Wroe (Ann Wroe – Economist) is an English author and columnist who has been the obituaries editor of The Economist since 2003. Her non-fiction books include biographies of Pontius Pilate, Percy Shelley and Perkin Warbeck. Lifescapes is a dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry. Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of fully capturing
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