It's late April and the British Labour party are almost certain to win the next British general election. It has become not a case of 'if', but rather of 'by how much'. Browse through the 50 top achievements of Tony Blair's outgoing government, as listed by themselves and you are faced with an impressive picture […]
Quietly last month a revolution took place: the United States was forced by scientists it had commissioned to acknowledge the imminent and potentially disastrous effects of the phenomenon known as ‘Peak Oil’. At the request of the Department of Energy, Robert Hirsch, a senior energy programme adviser at Science Applications International Corporation, along with Roger […]
The long-awaited interview (well, long awaited by Andrew at ThreeMonkeysOnline) with David Mitchell is now available here. The issue has also achieved a bit of a coup in getting an interview with critics’ darlings, Mercury Rev. There’s plenty of more stuff, including an unusually insightful discussion with Nell McCafferty, that shows a different side from […]
Since the death in February of poet and senator Mario Luzi, Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi* has a post to fill in the Italian Senate. Amongst the names in the running, which is taken from Italy’s cultural elite, are writers Oriana Fallaci and Andrea Camilleri. Both have had spectacular success with their books, topping the […]
IMPAC prize winning Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is an overtly political, but not polemical, novel dealing with the tensions below the surface in modern day Turkey.
Ian McEwan’s latest has been exhaustively reviewed in both Ireland and Britain since its release and it’s now getting fairly respectful notices in the U.S. I don’t have much too add, except two, related things that struck me when I read an interview with McEwan by Adam Begley, which appeared in the insiderish New York […]
For a while I’ve been mystified by the political cartoons of Steve Bell that regularly appear in The Guardian. Because I simply don’t get them, I was inclined to think that they operated on the level of a private joke with the more enlightened readership of that esteemed organ. Recently, however (mainly because I’m reluctant […]
Having spotted some samples on sale in Waterstones today, I recalled that there seems to be quite a cult of the Moleskine notebook on the Web. The company’s site boasts that mere mortals can avail of the same products “used by Van Gogh, Chatwin*, Hemingway, Matisse and C�line” (the writer, not to be confused with […]
Last week Alessandra Mussolini went on hunger strike, albeit with regular sugared cappuccino breaks. This week she’s relented, seeing that no ground was made in her efforts to have her party recognised for upcoming regional elections in Lazio [and Milan, where she has also had her party Alternativa Sociale banned for the collection of false […]