…that household name, Elfriede Jelinek! Well, at least I was half-right in my predictions, when I said that it was not unlikely that nobody among those mentioned as possibilities would actually win. After a perusal of Jelinek’s bio on the Nobel site, however, I was surprised to discover that I had a glancing, if indirect, […]

The biggest gong in writing, the Nobel Prize for Literature, is due to be announced tomorrow. The winners seem to oscillate between some Great Name whose major work is behind them (V.S Naipul, for example) and a figure few in the Anglophone world has ever heard off. (When Saul Bellow was awarded the prize in […]

Say what you like about Martin Amis’s novels–and most critics did when Yellow Dog was released last year–but his occasional journalism, the commissioned “colour” pieces usually contain a clutch of phrasings that reveal an aesthetic sensibility absent in most others’ hack work. In today’s Guardian, he finds an accommodating subject for his style in the […]

Faced with a situation in which beheadings are being streamed over the Internet and satellite television covers the collateral damage caused by “precision” bombing, the most improbable connections between technology and terror start to make sense.My example: last week I was working through an interesting title called “Object Thinking” by David West. West is a […]

In an attempt to create my own rickety bridge between the “Two Cultures” described by CP Snow, I occasionally try to bring my liberal arts-trained mind to grapple with science. (I think this erratic urge was initially prompted by that thought experiment that tries to envision how you would get on if you were sent […]

The ManBooker shortlist is unusual this year, at least for me, in that there�s more than one title listed that I could be bothered to buy.Actually, I�ve already consumed one of those that made the cut, Alan Hollinghurst�s The Line of Beauty, which was praised to the sky when it was released earlier this year. […]

The other day a friend of mine described a book as Rabelaisian. Taking the opportunity to be a smart-arse, I asked whether he had actually read Rabelais. He quickly assured me he had read Gargantua and Pantagruel, but was suggestively non-specific about how it ended.It’s something we rarely challenge: bandying eponymic references about, usually in […]

From yesterday’s Washington Post: “Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient’s wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth. “I said ‘Did he pick?’ […]

Ireland’s perennial entry in the Mr. Gravitas competition, John Banville, will be giving a reading at the Irish Writers’ Centre tomorrow (16 September).Although I’ve read, I think, four of his novels I’m somewhat on the fence about Banville (obviously I have to have read 10 novels by an author before I can come to a […]