Books features
Extract: Etc Etc AmenSaturday, 10 November 2012
When Zachary C noticed his audience were no longer beguiled by his best Zachary B smile, he arranged for his chargrilled-sweetcorn teeth to be replaced by a mouthful of ultraviolet-sensitive acrylic. Much to his delight, shop windows, car... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer Michael FraynSunday, 23 September 2012
Michael Frayn (b 1933) has been having an annus mirabilis. The play the hapless actors of Noises Off are touring is called Nothing On. In the playwright’s case, almost everything has been on. Frayn’s best-known farce spent the first half of the year... Read more... |
Angela Carter: Inside the Bloody ChamberFriday, 24 August 2012
Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had... Read more... |
Welsh Week: Dinefwr, Adain Avion, Llangollen, BrynFestThursday, 28 June 2012
This Friday afternoon at five o’clock, the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will recite a new poem and initiate a seismic week of Welsh cultural exploration. The inaugural Dinefwr Literary Festival will bring writers and musicians from Wales... Read more... |
Extract: The Stone Roses - War and PeaceSaturday, 02 June 2012
There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-... Read more... |
The Glastonbury of the Mind: Hay turns 25Thursday, 31 May 2012
Apart from “I did not have sex with that woman” and maybe “It’s the economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases with his name attached, none is quoted quite so tremulously as... Read more... |
Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, British LibraryMonday, 14 May 2012
Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Budapest: Hay Goes to HungaryThursday, 10 May 2012
Four weeks ahead of its core event in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye the world’s leading festival of literature, ideas and the arts rolls into Budapest. Celebrating its 25th year and 15th location, this is the first time “the Woodstock of the... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Laugharne WeekendWednesday, 18 April 2012
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between... Read more... |
The Real Mad MenMonday, 26 March 2012
The compulsive TV series about the Sixties advertising industry, Mad Men, opens its fifth season tomorrow night (on Sky Atlantic only, chiz), overflowing to the brim with its usual drinking, smoking, sex, sexism and wholesale un-PC liberality. Does... Read more... |
Charles Dickens, Theatre and Dance Critic-at-LargeThursday, 09 February 2012
When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For... Read more... |
The Bicentenary of the Birth of Charles Dickens, Westminster AbbeyTuesday, 07 February 2012
Why? The question really needs to be asked. Why all the hoopla, the adaptations, reprints, books, comics, tweets, no doubt Facebook pages too. Did we do this for Thackeray last year? Will we do it for Wilkie Collins? Or even George Eliot? A... Read more... |
