Published 47 years after the death of its author, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs offers itself as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, the work is beautifully translated by Richard Zenith in the Penguin Classics edition. Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa […]
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Robert Stone (Robert Stone obituary | Books | The Guardian) offered Outerbridge Reach in 1992 as his fifth novel. A rich business man with playboy tendencies enters a round-the-world sailing race to promote a new design of yacht his firm has developed. After a financial scandal his place is taken by Owen Browne, a salesman
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We are accustomed to hearing the phrase ‘The West’ upheld as a form of civilisation superior and more morally advanced than those of other benighted parts of the globe. Usually associated with freedom and democracy, it includes Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand. It is an evaluative term as much as descriptive. Its opponents
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Don DeLillo (Don DeLillo: ‘I wondered what would happen if power failed everywhere’ | Don DeLillo | The Guardian) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics,
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In this wonderful book William Dalrymple (Biography – William Dalrymple (en-GB)) describes the influence of the Indian subcontinent on global technology, astronomy, art, religion, music, mathematics, literature and mythology. Before The Silk Road, argues Dalrymple, came India’s ‘Golden Road’, which stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan
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Joya Chatterji FBA is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She specialises in modern South Asian history and was the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies for ten years. Shadows at Noon is about India in the 20th century, which means taking it from the late Victorian period, when it had become an
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The film Conclave (Conclave (2024) – IMDb) is being shown in cinemas in December 2024. It is a mystery thriller directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris (Robert Harris: “Great politicians are like novelists” – New Statesman). The film stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini. In the film, Cardinal
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Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784, Denis Diderot (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) was a French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. In this novel of 1796 the servant Jacques rides through France with his master. He appears to act as though
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As of 2024 William Boyd (Novels – William Boyd) has written 18 novels plus a number of short stories and screenplays. The New Confessions is a good recommendation to start enjoying this author’s fiction. The summary is as follows. From his birth in Edinburgh in 1899, John James Todd was doomed. Emerging from an angst-filled
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