Wearing your heart on your sleeve is a cagey endevour, something which New Zealand’s indie deities The Clean go for broke with on Stars. For this cat it’s the most remarkable musical success of 2001, a year when indie took an ice cold shower and cured the jaded malady of the scurrying Brit Pop hangover. On […]
House, quoted in Kiraly, quoted in Kelly (under heading “What not to do!”), paraphrased by me: Don’t set translation students a text to translate that is full of traps, let them prepare it and then go through it sentence by sentence, student by student, eliciting alternative translations for each sentence before plumping for the one […]
When Daniel Sempere visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, his father invites the boy to take his pick from the shelves. Daniel settles on The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax; a Barcelona writer exiled in Paris. Carax’s work has become much sought after due to its rarity. Even the devil wants a copy. […]
Welsh band The Automatic were the sensation of 2006 – in the UK at least. The band, after several succesful tours including the prestigious NME New Music Tour, released their debut album ‘Not Accepted Anywhere’, only to find, thanks to two very succesful singles Raoul and Monster, that quite the opposite was true. Monster in […]
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.
Hopes and dreams are the stuff of calculations, and conditional clauses; if I do x, then hopefully y will come my way. For the characters in Laila Lalami’s elegant novel Hope and other dangerous pursuits hopes and dreams have another more fundamental element – geography. All the calculations and aspirations of the characters rest on […]
Never judge a book by its cover. Sage advice, but what about its title? I approached Jonathan Lethem’s slim short-story collection Men and Cartoons less than enthusiastically, resigned to reading it because it was a) a gift, and b) short. The problem? The title, plus the promise that more than one story would concern itself with superherose, […]
Watching cartoons the other night, I heard someone say to a schoolgirl “Welcome to the glamorous world of unpaid internships,” or words to that effect, before the glamorous world of exploitation and skivvydom was portrayed in primary colours. I don’t recall receiving such good career advice when I was in school. My generation had to […]
The plot thickens. Weeks ago the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay was pre-emptively blocked by the police division in charge of post and communications here in Italy. With a flick of the switch the site became inaccessible (despite the fact, as journalist Alessandro Longo points out that the Pirate Bay has yet to be […]