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 […]
Mervyn Peake’s much-loved cult series was brought to an abrupt and tragic end with the onset of Parkinson’s and Encephalitis. The mantle, however, was to be taken up in Titus Awakes by none other than his wife Maeve Gilmore – quite a surprise given that no one knew of her manuscript until its discovery by […]
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 […]
As participants in the mortal experience, it is inevitable that the said experience will come to an end and that end is death. It is the one experience that we all share and it demands a constant presence in how we live our lives. It occupies the full spectrum of human interest from the philosophical heights […]
TMO interview with Premio Strega winning Italian novelist Paolo Giordano “A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked […]
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 […]
A good starting place to talk about Steven Galloway’s novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, is a 1976 interview with American author John Cheever. Cheever, asked by the Paris Review’s Annette Grant about the trend for novelists to write journalism, responded angrily “I don’t like your question. Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot […]
“For in vain from the grasp of Religion I flee The most tenderly loved of my soul Are slaves to its hated control It pursues me, it blasts me! Oh where shall I fly What remains but to curse it, to curse it to die?” (1) Every bit the sneering, instinctive, anti-puritanical, vote-splitting impulsive Prometheus, […]
