Tribes of clutter. The Comfort of Things
November 22, 2008
A new study of contemporary Londoners’ possessions and the values they attach to them reveals a shift of allegiance away from wider society and towards the individual household
The real Kafka, warts,porn, whores and all
November 15, 2008
These are the bald facts. But Franz Kafka, the man, or better still the noun-phrase, conjures up far much more than that.
Factory for unhappy people
August 8, 2008
Mr Delves Broughton did not set out to write a book about the course. Nor is this probably the book that HBS would choose to mark its 100th birthday, which it is celebrating extensively this year.
Utopians’ bonfire of profanities
July 16, 2008
The two extremes reflect the ambivalent attitudes people have always had to burning books, says Fishburn, who works in the rare book business. People still burn books for all sorts of reasons, he tells the HES.
Fishing in Utopia
July 14, 2008
The notion of Sweden as a modern democratic utopia has long beguiled the left and perplexed the right.
F. Kafka, Everyman
July 14, 2008
If few readers of Kafka can be truly sorry for the existence of the works Kafka had consigned to oblivion, many regret the way Brod chose to present them.
Everybody needs to get thicker skins
July 11, 2008
Readers have voted Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children their favourite Booker prize-winner of all time - and it’s not even his best-known work
Men in White [Netherland by Joseph O’Neill]
July 11, 2008
The ambiguous title fits a novel remarkable for its complex geographical situation. Joseph O’Neill, with his mixed Irish and Turkish parentage, and a childhood spent partly in the Hague, now lives in New York City
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
July 8, 2008
Uncommon Arrangements explores the dynamics of seven miserable ‘marriages à la mode’. From the hell that was life with H G Wells (’I am thinking continually’, wrote his wife, who shared him with a harem, ‘of the disappointing mess of it’) to the weirdness of being loved
Returning To Earth
July 5, 2008
‘Jibanananda’ is a Tagorean name; its meaning, ‘the joy of life’, recalls, for me, the lines from a famous song in the Gitanjali, in which Tagore’s defiant Nietzschean mood is contained, as it almost always is, by decorum and serenity: ‘Jagate ananda jagne/ Amaar nimantrana’ —
