The Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig was once among the most popular and most translated writers in the world. English Heritage’s widely criticised refusal to commemorate his residence in London provides an entry point into a discussion on the role of the intellectual, Brexit, and the meaning of Europe.
English identity sits at the centre of the debate on British membership of the EU, but that identity, moulded by television and the tabloid media has become a surrogate Englishness dominated by pint supping, cricket watching, and endless mugs of tea; an identity shorn of its uncomfortable, radical roots. What, though might the English tradition […]
Crossing Europe by train last summer, it was only on arrival in Romania that I realised we had unwittingly followed the very route (Paris-Munich-Budapest) taken by Jonathan Harker, the young solicitor at the start of Dracula (1897). Returning home to Bridport – in excellent health, I should probably add – I mentioned this to a […]
This month will see the twelfth IRC (Immigration Return Centre) in Britain open on Portland, Dorset. The two most recent additions to this flourishing archipelago have both been converted prisons in relatively remote areas, well away from the largest migrant communities with their specialist lawyers. The expectation may have been that re-opening the Verne as […]
From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website […]
I attended the talk one evening last June, upstairs in a second-hand bookshop a short walk from my home. The journalist had reported in the past from Iran and Iraq and was now just back from Libya, the outcome of the war there still uncertain. During the discussion which followed a human rights lawyer who […]
In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is […]
As is so often the way with beginnings, I was looking for someone and something else completely when I stumbled on the class Samia Mehrez is teaching. Professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, she came up with the idea of Translating the Revolution and organised its schedule within weeks of Mubarak’s […]
Any English—speaker to whom Vaclav Havel has mattered owes a debt they’re probably unaware of to Paul Wilson. His work as the Czech writer’s translator began thirty years ago but I discover, over a cup of coffee off Russell Square, that he first came to London from his native Canada ten years before that, to […]
Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin books, was in many ways a crucial though unlikely figure in the counter-culture of the sixties, defending D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ from obscenity charges. In this article Horatio Morpurgo, Lane’s grandson, writes a compelling and personal history of Lady Chatterley’s Defendant.
