div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/16570?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+A+life+in+poetry%3A+Ruth+Padelch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Ruth+Padel+%28kw%29%2CPoetry+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2COxford+professor+of+poetry+%28Books%29c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CUnclassifed+Contributorsc6=Sarah+Crownc7=2009_05_16c8=1216149c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Ruth+Padelc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FRuth+Padelh2=GU%2FBooks%2FRuth+Padelc13=c10=Feature+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FRuth+Padel%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216149%7CA+life+in+poetry%3A+Ruth+Padel%7C" width="1" height="1" //divp'I have now, unjustly, not by my own doing, been tainted ... But if I am elected, I intend to do the best I can'/ppLooking back over the last week, Ruth Padel doesn't mince her words. "It's horrible," she says. "Derek Walcott is my colleague: I revere his work, and have written about him and learned from him. I had absolutely no wish to see him humiliated, and I'm very, very sorry he pulled out."/ppThe campaign for the position of Oxford poetry professor, of which Padel was one of three candidates, this week turned abruptly from race into car crash. The five-year role, which carries the obligation to deliver 15 lectures, is decided through an election in which all members of Oxford University are eligible to vote. That election is being held today, but although the voting is still taking place, the result looks like a sure thing. Barring a last-minute surge of support for her remaining rival, the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, or Padel feeling compelled to stand down, she will be confirmed this evening as the first female incumbent of the 300-year-old chair - an appointment that, in the wake of Carol Ann Duffy's inauguration as poet laureate on 1 May, would see May 2009 go down in the annals as a historic month for women poets. By rights, Padel should be dancing in the aisles - but the events of the last week have left her with little to smile about./ppPadel was the first person to announce her candidacy for the post back in February, with the high-profile support of, among others, Alice Oswald, Gwyneth Lewis and Melvyn Bragg. "All her life she has been committed to poetry, to spreading the word. I cannot think of anyone who would make a better professor of poetry at Oxford," said Colm Toacute;ibiacute;n; while Duffy described her as "the perfect candidate ... an articulate and accessible, passionate and judicious advocate for poets and poetry". Padel stood uncontested until March, when the Nobel laureate Walcott threw his hat into the ring. From then on, despite the late candidacy of Mehrotra, the contest was widely seen as a two-horse race, with Walcott just edging the lead. But last weekend, letters containing details of allegations of sexual harassment made against Walcott during his tenures at Harvard and Boston universities were delivered anonymously to Oxford academics - and a formerly decorous contest for an esoteric professorship morphed overnight into seamy national news. On Tuesday, Walcott withdrew his candidacy, claiming that the race had "degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination [and] I do not want to be part of it"./ppPerhaps inevitably, suggestions arose that Padel - having, apparently, the most to gain - was behind the letter campaign; Walcott's supporter Professor Hermione Lee urged her to "publicly dissociate" herself from the rumours, and there have been calls for her, too, to pull out of the race. At the time of going to press, however, Padel says she has no intention of withdrawing. She insists she has no idea from whom the letters originated, and claims to be deeply disappointed to find herself in the position of winning, as it were, by default. "I have now, unjustly, not by my own doing, been tainted whatever I do," she says. "My supporters fought a clean campaign on the grounds of what I might offer the post. I asked supporters I respect, in Oxford and outside, what they thought: they all said I must not withdraw." Support appears to be crumbling, however, with one of her champions, AC Grayling, publicly calling on her to stand down. "I have no idea what will happen," she says. "But whatever does happen, it is very sad. All along, we should have been talking about poetry, and the role of poetry. This is not what poetry's for."/ppFor Padel poetry is a sort of connective tissue; a thread to unite all subjects and disciplines. "I think I was formed by the 19th century," she says, by way of explanation. "There's something about the mindset of that time: a curiosity, a drive to make links. It appeals to me deeply." It's a sympathy that finds its fullest expression in her latest work, a biography in poetry of her great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, whose commitment to rationality over belief, evidence over revelation, made him a figurehead for precisely the brand of 19th-century intellectual progressivism that Padel admires. "I learned of the connection as a child," she says. "My grandmother - his granddaughter - published the first unexpurgated version of his biography. The first time it really impinged was at school: we had to write an essay on the life of a scientist, and I chose him."/ppFast-forward half a century and Padel found herself writing about Darwin again, rediscovering him on a research trip for her acclaimed 2005 conservation memoir, Tigers in Red Weather, when she took his works with her as background reading. "I was kayaking through Laos," she says, "and realised that where he had travelled through the tropics learning how species came to be, I was travelling through them learning how species came to be extinct. His forests were emptying. It was then I felt the first stirrings of wanting to write about him." Back in England, she pushed the project to the back of her mind until two phone calls, one from the Bristol Festival of Ideas and one from the Natural History Museum, reawakened it. "They both asked me to contribute poems to their celebrations of Darwin's bicentenary. And it was while working on them that I began to conceive of the idea of setting his whole life out in poems." The book was well received: Richard Holmes in particular was impressed by her technical skills (the surfaces of the poems are patchworked; quotations from Darwin's journals and correspondences skilfully stitched together with Padel's own words) and the "bewildering" variety of stanza forms she employs to tell a story that is at once "immensely powerful and disturbing"./ppThe eldest of five children, Padel was born in 1946 in the attic of her great aunt's house in Wimpole Street - a circumstance that lends her arrival in the world a gratifyingly Dickensian ring. Though an early reader (the first book she remembers was Kipling's The Jungle Book), it was music that formed the backcloth of her childhood, and indirectly set her on the road to poetry: "singing and poetry," she says now, "seem to me to be part of the same thing." School was, initially, a struggle, but she tackled O-levels by dint of learning chunks of her textbooks by heart, embarked on classics and English literature A-levels, and finally began to see the point of it all. "When I started to read the Odyssey, it all came together. It took me about three hours to work out the first two lines, but after that it began to flow - and I was in love."/ppShe pursued Latin and Greek at university, embarking on what would turn out to be a long association with Oxford when she went up in 1965 to read classics at Lady Margaret Hall. Her doctoral thesis on the idea of the mind in Greek tragedy took seven years to complete; time she divided between trips to Crete, where she picked up modern Greek, and stints of teaching in Oxford. Her loyalty and affection for the place stem from this time: Wadham College made her its first female fellow, changing its statutes to accommodate her. The 1970s marked the beginning of the great revolution in classical studies: Oxford was in the thick of it, and Padel was in her element. "It was just when structuralism was coming to the fore - a very heady time, intellectually," she recalls. "And that freedom spilled over into the rest of life. I lived for a while with the sculptor Michael Black. He taught me how to live a creative life: when he needed money, he made prints and sold them. That's the model on which I still operate."/ppShe left Oxford in 1976 and returned to Crete, teaching English while she whittled her thesis into a book. And it was here that she began, tentatively, to write the poems that would eventually appear in her first collection - though publication remained over a decade off. Back in London, she took a teaching post at Birkbeck and met and married Myles Burnyeat, professor of ancient philosophy at Cambridge. In 1985, their daughter, Gwen, was born, and the event acted as an unexpected catalyst for Padel's writing./pp"Everything had been gradually amassing, but Gwen's arrival seemed to open the gates," she says, "because of the focus it brought." She published her first pamphlet of poems, Alibi, that year, and slowly set about establishing herself as a freelance writer, despite finding that, in journalism, "poetry isn't a great calling-card. I know of one editor who said: 'I'd never have anything to do with a poet; they never say what they mean.' So I felt I wasn't seen as a very good bet, but I gradually found a niche for myself."/ppAs the writing took off, however, Padel returned to London with her daughter (then five). The family saw one another at weekends, but distance took its toll; Burnyeat and Padel eventually separated, "although we remain very good friends". Her first full-length collection, Summer Snow, came out in 1990, when she was 44, and the inclusion of a poem from it in a PEN anthology led to an encounter with another poet, Matthew Sweeney, that had a profound effect on her career. At a party for the anthology, Sweeney invited her to take part in his workshop, whose membership (Don Paterson, Sean O'Brien, Jo Shapcott, Michael Donaghy, Lavinia Greenlaw and Sarah Maguire, among others) reads like the roll-call of a generation. /pp"It was," she acknowledges now, "a movement, or something like it. We'd meet once a month at the Lamb pub on Conduit Street, bringing a poem each and considering them anonymously. My second collection, Angel, came out of the surprisingness of that process. Matthew had a genius for diagnosing a poem: he wouldn't say how to fix it, but he'd put his finger on the sore spot. It was he, too, who led to the formal shift in my work that happened in [the 1998 collection] Rembrandt Would Have Loved You. I was complaining about not being able to get away from three-liners, and he said: 'Well, you're stuck on it! Do something completely different.' So I started writing these big, structured poems, full of capitals and indentations - fantastically artificial-seeming things, but I found they imposed a wonderful formality. I became obsessed with this idea of form as a means of moving through the tangle."/ppPadel won the National Poetry competition in 1997 with "Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire", the opening poem of Rembrandt Would Have Loved You. Elaborate, sensual, speckled with contemporary references to Pepsodent and Aretha Franklin, the poem exhibits all the qualities of Padel's mature work, and which saw her next two collections, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, shortlisted for the Whitbread and TS Eliot prizes./ppRembrandt's passionate, turbulent poems charted the beginning of an intense five-year relationship with an attached man that played out in sometimes startlingly explicit detail across Padel's next two collections. Half a decade on, she has no regrets about using her personal life as material for her poetry. "Once it's happened, it's the end product that's important," she insists. "What matters is the springiness of the form. You've got to trust the poem." Was her lover comfortable with being written about? She hoots with laughter. "I think he was proud of it! In fact, he was pretty annoyed when I wrote a poem that wasn't about him."/ppTigers in Red Weather, Padel's account of her travels in search of the animal that has haunted her since her Jungle Book days, also arose, in part, from the demise of this relationship. In its opening chapter she explains how the affair's disintegration pushed her towards tigers, which symbolised, for her, the act of "surviving, alone". The book, she says now, was triggered by her need to "physically set off somewhere new"; in writing terms, she was also entering uncharted territory. But while prose rather than poetry was her medium, the book is vintage Padel: a rich stew of science, myth and literature, sprouting meditations on everything from yetis to archery. From the beginning of her career critics have been impressed by this energy; her range of interests and wholehearted emotional engagement. Her work has a "speedy omnivorous relish", said Sean O'Brien; Jeanette Winterson describes it as "sexy, strong, rhythmic, passionate, fully alive". And all life is filtered through "the lens" of poetry. "In my upbringing, there were all these ways of seeing: psychoanalysis, biology, botany, even music. But poetry seemed the natural thing, the best expression of it all."/ppThis devotion to poetry has resulted in the second, more public strand to Padel's career that persuaded her, finally, to put herself forward for the Oxford professorship: that of a champion, a poetry proselytiser. In 1996, Suzi Feay, then literary editor of the Independent on Sunday, agreed to Padel's pitch for a weekly column discussing a single poem. The column ran for years, and its success (it was eventually published as two books, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem and The Poem and the Journey) undoubtedly played a part in the Poetry Society's decision to invite Padel to stand as its chair. With echoes of Duffy's final decision to accept the laureateship, she was talked into it by her daughter: "She said, 'Oh, come on, mum, have a go.' We laughed afterwards about how I cursed her for it."/ppWhile she chalked up some impressive achievements during her tenure ("I invented a system called Stanzas, which links the society to groups all over the country, and ran a series called 'Under the Influence', with contemporary poets discussing their influences, at the London Review bookshop"), the experience was a fraught one, and she didn't write any poetry of her own during that period./ppAs her candidacy for the Oxford post has proven, however, her zeal remains intact. Not even the sordid final days of the campaign have muted her enthusiasm. Tonight, she'll find out for certain if the job is hers, and if it is, "I'd very much want to do some work with the zoology department - which they've asked me to do anyway, even if not elected. And I'd like to forge links with other disciplines I'm close to: music and anthropology, for instance." Though the fall-out from the campaign may, she admits, "taint things for a while, if I am elected, once you're there ... well, poetry rises above it. I intend to do the best I possibly can."/ph2Padel on Padel/h2p"The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.br /Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst br /and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this br /means he's better; and working on a haul of lumpen light. /ppPolyps, plankton, jellyfish. Sea butterflies, the pteropods.br /'So low in the scale of nature, exquisite in their forms! br /You wonder at so much beauty - created,br /apparently, for such little purpose!' They lower his creel/ppto blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white br /as a gun-flash over the blown heart of sapphire. br /Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen, br /tossing on lazuline steel."/ppThis marks the moment when Charles Darwin began actually to enjoy the Beagle, rather than lying seasick on the captain's sofa. It is January 1832, he is 22, heading south through the north Atlantic, and starting work as a naturalist. The key ideas come in obliquely: Darwin still believes in biblical creation, yet his own language is readying him to doubt it (apparently). The rhymes often see-saw between the inside and the end of lines (ocean/swollen). The lyric description is inextricable from the imagery. A translator pointed out to me that I often use double images, an image for an image (those rainbows and amethysts). I like mixing tones and registers, complex sensuous imagery, vernacular and direct speech./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ruth-padel"Ruth Padel/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry"Poetry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/oxford-professor-of-poetry"Oxford professor of poetry/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NkzjI6tjXXk4U37Xqdgef9DTi9M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NkzjI6tjXXk4U37Xqdgef9DTi9M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NkzjI6tjXXk4U37Xqdgef9DTi9M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/NkzjI6tjXXk4U37Xqdgef9DTi9M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/5553?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Endurance+testsch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Fiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Aminatta+Fornac7=2009_05_16c8=1216152c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Fictionc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionh2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FFiction%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216152%7CEndurance+tests%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpAminatta Forna finds melancholy and disappointment in Adichie's short stories/ppIn 2007 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Orange prize with her Biafran epic Half of a Yellow Sun, which went on to sell half a million copies in the UK alone. This novel was a major achievement, a brilliant followup to her subtle and moving debut Purple Hibiscus, which dealt with the themes of domestic violence and religiosity and itself won the author a Commonwealth award. Half of a Yellow Sun brought Adichie's work to a worldwide audience and the kind of readers who would never normally pick up a book set in Nigeria by an African writer. Last year Adichie also won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, popularly known as America's "genius award"./ppSince then, many have wondered what Adichie, who is still only 31, will do next. Her answer has been to return to short fiction, for which she also won awards and critical acclaim - though less public notice - early in her career. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of 12 short stories, focusing mainly on the lives and experiences of Nigerian women - women caught up in political or religious violence, coping with displacement, loneliness and disappointment in their new lives or their new marriages, surviving tragedy. The women are generally middle class, intelligent but unconfident, and tend to be routed by more selfish and amoral characters. In "Imitation", a young wife, living a life of isolation in America, discovers her wealthy husband has moved a mistress into the family home in Lagos. "On Monday of Last Week" tells the story of a university-educated Nigerian woman, again in America, forced to make ends meet by working as a home help. In "The America Embassy", a woman whose child has been murdered by political thugs hunting for her husband suffers the many petty humiliations shared by anyone who has ever applied for a visa from a poor African country to a wealthy western one. Though there are faint notes of optimism, overall these are melancholy stories, of disappointment and endurance rather than hope./ppOnly one story features a male narrator. "Ghosts" relates an encounter between a retired university professor and a former colleague who the professor believed had died during the Biafran war. During their conversation, the professor inwardly recalls the many changes that have taken place in the intervening years, the betrayals by colleagues and by governments, the loss of dreams and also of the professor's own wife as a result of being treated with counterfeit drugs, the same wife who still pays nightly visits to her husband's room. It is a moving, tender story that takes us back to the world Adichie relayed so convincingly in Half of a Yellow Sun/ppAdichie's writing is suffused with social and political comment; she is a writer who evidently takes seriously her role as a mouthpiece for the experiences of those living in the continent of her birth. But if this is the driving force behind many writers coming out of Africa, it is also the black writer's burden - to be moved by what one sees and yet not be bound by it. Adichie handled the balance best in Half of a Yellow Sun, perhaps because the scale of the narrative allowed her the time and opportunity to explore the effect of war on character. However, some of the stories in this collection fall short of the acuity and accomplishment of her novels, so that one wonders if they perhaps come from an earlier period in Adichie's writing and have been dusted off for this collection. /ppThe least successful stories are those where the author's desire to make a statement is too plainly felt, the most successful when she concentrates on character, situation or (as in "Tomorrow Is Too Far", one of the shortest but most deft of the stories) how lives are changed in a single moment. Then the powerful themes close to Adichie's heart shine through, but never overshadow writing of clarity and brilliance. /ppAminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones is published by Bloomsbury. To order The Thing Around Your Neck for pound;13.99 with free UK pp call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VlLdj_3kpi5OGVQpwBa1XR3hXBs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VlLdj_3kpi5OGVQpwBa1XR3hXBs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VlLdj_3kpi5OGVQpwBa1XR3hXBs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VlLdj_3kpi5OGVQpwBa1XR3hXBs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/80611?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Furry+talesch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=History+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Kathryn+Hughesc7=2009_05_16c8=1216198c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Historyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FHistoryh2=GU%2FBooks%2FHistoryc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FHistory%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216198%7CFurry+tales%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpKathryn Hughes on the strange case of the Gonzales sisters/ppOnce upon a time, at the turn of the 16th century to be exact, there were three little sisters who were covered in fur. The hair on their faces was soft and fine, like that of a well-kept dog. On their arms and backs it was coarser, like a monkey's. At least, that's what the doctors who examined them said. Most people never got to find out, since the Gonzales sisters - Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta - were respectable young women who wore as many clothes as everyone else. Decked out in their best brocade dresses, with the customary ruffs around their necks, they looked like what they were - the daughters of an educated man who might, in time, make good marriages of their own. The only thing odd about them, and really you could hardly miss it, was their thick pelts./ppAnyone hoping for the inside story about what the Gonzales sisters thought about their odd condition - now diagnosed as hypertrichosis universalis - is going to be disappointed. Like the vast majority of non-hairy girls in history, they left no records. So we will never know about the moment they first realised that most of the world looked like their smooth-skinned mama rather than their shaggy dad. The time that some cruel lout barked at them in the street is likewise lost for ever. What kind of erotic exchanges passed between Maddalena and her husband - she was the only sister who married - are also unrecoverable. Instead, what Merry Wiesner-Hanks offers us in this elegant and wide-ranging study is the chance to think ourselves back into the mindset of Renaissance Europe and experience something of the shock, curiosity and eventual acceptance with which the world greeted those marvellous hairy girls./ppWiesner-Hanks starts by sketching a worldview in which extraordinary creatures were assumed to live just around the corner. Pliny the Elder's confident assertion that there existed a one-legged tribe who stood on their shoulders and used their enormous feet as umbrellas was greeted with grave acquiescence by Renaissance scholars eager to grant classical learning a new authority. Add in some weird and wonderful stories from the Christian tradition - such as St Wilgefortis, who grew a beard in order to avoid marriage to a pagan - and you had a culture in which it was easy to believe several impossible things before breakfast. Even Martin Luther, a man with a mission to purge the Catholic church of all sorts of superstitious nonsense, was able to report to his students that there had once been a woman in the city of Eisenach who had given birth to a dormouse simply because she'd been frightened by one during her pregnancy./ppSo in 1547, when a 10-year-old boy turned up from the Canary Isles covered in hair, no one at the French court was seriously startled. They may have been curious or fearful, tickled or terrified, but the simple fact that Petrus Gonzales appeared to be half-man half-beast would not have shaken any core beliefs. In a world where a manticore - a combination of a man's head, lion's body and scorpion's tale - was known to exist, the appearance of a creature composed of only two elements was, when you came to think about it, really rather humdrum. There was still, though, the problem of what to do with him. Should young Petrus be consigned to a private zoo? Or made to take up trickstering like the court dwarves? It was then that the king, Henri II, stepped in and set the course of the Gonzales family's fate. The boy would be treated like any other privileged child of the court (including a young visitor from Scotland, Mary Stuart). He would be taught Latin and good manners, dressed in the long dark robes of a scholar, and eventually given a job as a confidential secretary./ppIt sounds lovely and enlightened, but Wiesner-Hanks is pretty certain that there must have been sniggers and worse among less favoured courtiers. The idea of a dog-like creature spouting Latin wasn't merely funny, it suggested that the natural order was being overturned. Add in the simmering tensions between Catholics and Protestants (the St Bartholomew's day massacre was only a few years away) and the worry that women such as Catherine de' Medici and Mary Tudor were seizing power, and you had a context in which some people might find Petrus Gonzales a worrying symbol of an upside-down, back-to-front world./ppWhen it came to his daughters, suggests Wiesner-Hanks, those anxieties must have been even sharper. Along with his three girls, Petrus and his wife had three sons, two of them also hairy. But it was the girls rather than their brothers that people wanted to touch, paint and own. There was something about the idea of a hairy woman that was especially alluring and repulsive, both sexual and bestial at the same time. All the girls were the subjects of portraits, some done from life, but others from pure fantasy. Really what everyone wanted to know, but was too polite to ask, was just how far down their hair went. It was left to Dr Felix Platter of Basel to be given permission to prod and poke. He reported that the little Gonzales girl whom he examined - it is not clear which - was very hairy right along her spine./ppThis isn't a story with any particular ending. The sources are too patchy for that. Antonietta became the property of the Marchesa of Soragna and played the part of petted slave. Maddalena's husband was the keeper of the Duke of Parma's kennels, which may have been a nasty joke on someone's part, or simply an embarrassing coincidence. Francesca seems to have died early. The boys did better, as boys mostly did in 16th-century Europe, following their father into jobs as superior clerks. The hairy gene died out in the family, and remains vanishingly rare today. There have been only 50 reported cases anywhere in the world since then. That, however, didn't stop the scriptwriters for CSI coming up with a recent storyline about a woman suffering from hypertrichosis universalis having to hide herself away in the Nevada desert. Compared with her, the Gonzales girls landed on their (presumably hairy) feet./pp• Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/history"History/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r8g0BIFpK-fIx8o-DF9og6rFFSE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r8g0BIFpK-fIx8o-DF9og6rFFSE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r8g0BIFpK-fIx8o-DF9og6rFFSE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/r8g0BIFpK-fIx8o-DF9og6rFFSE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/60516?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Anthem+for+doomed+youthch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Biography+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Diana+Athillc7=2009_05_16c8=1216143c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Biographyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FBiographyh2=GU%2FBooks%2FBiographyc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FBiography%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216143%7CAnthem+for+doomed+youth%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpDiana Athill first read Vera Brittain's wartime memoir when it was published in 1933 and found the author tiresomely self-important and melodramatic. How did she get it so wrong?/ppIn 1919 Vera Brittain was shattered to discover that her slightly younger fellow-students at Somerville College, Oxford found her memories of the War (she always gave it a capital letter) boring. She had lost her brother and his three best friends, one of whom she was in love with, had served with devotion in the VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment - women who volunteered to nurse the war-wounded under the aegis of the Red Cross), and, at the war's end, was near a nervous breakdown from grief and overwork. When she spoke of these experiences at a meeting of the college debating society the audience responded unkindly. That evening, "too miserable to light a fire or even to get into bed, I lay on the cold floor and wept with childish abandon. 'Why couldn't I have died in the War with the others?' I lamented ... 'Why couldn't a torpedo have finished me off ... I'm nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage, living on ingloriously in a world that doesn't want me!'"/ppI must confess that, reading this book soon after its publication in 1933, I was on the side of the young women who had caused this misery. What came across to me then was her self-importance and heavy earnestness, and I (a very new-fledged pacifist) disliked the way she wrote as though she alone had suffered in the war, romanticising it even as she abhorred it. Every adult I knew had been through it, and none of them saw themselves as wreckage living on ingloriously and unwanted. Of course war was unspeakably vile - but what a tiresomely melodramatic woman this one was!/ppSo it was a surprise to pick her book up now and discover how very good it is./ppBrittain could indeed be self-important, but more to the point are her lively intelligence and genuine passion. She was brave, and her strong feelings would always express themselves in action. And she was honest. Why do today's reviewers congratulate autobiographers such as I for trying to be honest as though it had never been done before, when there she was in 1933, as blazingly honest as anyone can be? We would know nothing of her weaknesses and occasional absurdities if she had not recorded them so scrupulously, and how much more we understand about the nature of that hideous war, after she has evoked the innocent idealism with which her brother, her fianceacute; Roland Leighton and their friends went into it - and how they ended./ppHer rage at the limitations of pre-war provincial society is also an eye-opener, and her successful struggle to escape makes a good story in itself, as well as explaining why those beloved young men played such a dominant part in her emotional life. No less admirable is her vivid account of her initiation as a nurse, the dreadful conditions in which she worked, and the way she was supported by believing she was sharing at least a little of what the man she adored was enduring. And the appalling moment when she ran joyfully to take the phone call which would tell her he had arrived home on leave, and was told he was dead./ppSurely I must always have been moved by that? Yes, the shudder of recognition that came over me now when she was buying the dress she was going to wear for him, and I remembered what was going to happen on the next page, proves that I was. She did sometimes slip into over-writing, but she could most powerfully convey the indescribable when she had to, and at least I recognised that. Otherwise, however, my young self was doing something from which I recoiled when I met it not long ago in a silly woman who told me she detested the stories of that marvellous writer Alice Munro, "because she writes about such dreary, low-class people". I had failed to understand Vera Brittain because she wrote about people whose extreme sexual innocence (she and Leighton hardly ever even held hands) appeared to me ridiculous, and whose eager embracing of the war as "glorious" shocked me. It is shaming to see that I reacted like an illiterate nincompoop./ppNow I can see clearly how remarkable Brittain was. Her stuffily middle-class family could not have been more conventional. Her parents never questioned that their son should go to a university if so inclined, but saw their pretty little daughter's wish to do the same as absurd; nor was it thinkable that she should go anywhere, even to shop in nearby Manchester, unaccompanied. As for being alone with a man - that was so indecent that when, on just one daring occasion, she and Leighton managed to engineer a short train journey together, they were too shy to talk to each other naturally until the last moment. /ppBut in spite of all these inhibitions Brittain went on driving her parents mad with Oxford, Oxford, Oxford; why couldn't she go to Oxford? Eventually she won. "What would people think?" always weighed heavily with them, so the balance was tipped when a visiting university extension lecturer, who struck them as distinguished, took her desire as natural and within her reach. But she herself had brought it to the tipping point; and with no coaching or encouragement got herself through the entrance exams with record speed, teaching herself Greek for the purpose. Observing how her brother and his friends read and talked and used their minds, she resolved to achieve acceptance as their equal, and she made it./ppShe was always to make any "it" she aimed for, although she often described herself as nervous and unsure, partly no doubt for fear that acknowledging her own abilities would look conceited. It is not possible to be quite sure how well aware she was of her own cleverness and strength of will. But she was highly strung and emotional, so probably she really did experience much of the anguished uncertainty she describes before each triumph; and once she was committed to Roland Leighton, triumphs became less important. When she witnessed the elation with which he and the other boys welcomed the prospect of fighting and perhaps dying "gloriously" for their country, her own imagination caught fire. She had enough of it to envisage horrors, but she felt she too ought to experience them in order to stay with the boys - particularly with Leighton - in spirit. As she would say when looking back, "The War made masochists of us all". /ppSo she withdrew from Somerville and began nursing the wounded, and the grimmer her work, the more dedicated to it this hitherto sheltered young woman, who had never put her hand to any physically disagreeable task, became. One can only feel awestruck at the courage and endurance that she and her fellow VADs discovered in themselves./ppThen came the deaths: Leighton's, her brother's and those of their two closest friends. They turned Brittain into a committed pacifist. There had always been sane instincts in her even when she was at her most romantic: she had never, for example, demonised German soldiers whose deaths she knew were as pitiful as those of Englishmen, and her objection to society's attitude to women was always steady and sensible. Now her future path was determined, although it was some time before she could see it./ppHer recovery from the ravages of grief and four years of physical exhaustion was long and painful, not helped by her plunge back into hard work at Oxford almost at once. But it was helped by a relationship she formed there: her enduring friendship with the novelist-to-be Winifred Holtby. Both young women had brought their parents to heel by then, so after Oxford Brittain's father helped her financially to start life in London, where she shared a studio flat with Holtby, and they both scraped enough money to live on by part-time teaching and lecturing. /ppThese activities bought time for what really mattered: turning themselves into writers. Holtby was a novelist by nature. Brittain forced herself to write two novels which got published, but was more at home as a journalist - a columnist rather than a reporter - and was soon writing and lecturing on behalf of the League of Nations, which seemed at the time a useful way of working towards world peace. And, as her daughter Shirley Williams says in her introduction to the new edition of Testament of Youth, she would continue all her life "writing, campaigning, organising against war"./ppAlthough still in her 20s, she was convinced that she would never marry. She didn't want to - loving meant suffering, so out with it! She saw this as a tragic decision and therefore, given as she was to extremes, she embraced it with a martyr's enthusiasm. So there is inevitably something slightly comic in the fact that, once she had established that he revered work for the equality of women and the economic security of the working man, and that he also granted that her work was more important than any domestic involvement, she capitulated (though grudgingly) to the wooing of George Catlin, and married him. Cross though she might have been at the time if forced to admit it, this does make a satisfyingly happy ending to her wonderful book./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/biography"Biography/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBW9mlbNm4BKSdrsGmgtvMQtvpo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBW9mlbNm4BKSdrsGmgtvMQtvpo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBW9mlbNm4BKSdrsGmgtvMQtvpo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/rBW9mlbNm4BKSdrsGmgtvMQtvpo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/31121?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+You+can%27t+be+seriousch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Publishing+%28Books%29%2CBiography+%28Books+genre%29%2CPolitics+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Andy+Beckettc7=2009_05_16c8=1216197c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Publishingc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FPublishingh2=GU%2FBooks%2FPublishingc13=c10=c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FPublishing%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216197%7CYou+can%27t+be+serious%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpCelebrity memoirs, declining libraries, the web and now the recession have all spelled bad news for publishing. Once thriving genres such as political and literary biography are ailing. Is it the end for quality non-fiction? Andy Beckett investigates/ppColin Robinson has been in publishing since 1976. He has worked for fusty companies and radical ones, for earnest independents and empire-building corporations, for Britons and Americans: as an editor, always involved in the slightly precarious business of putting out serious books. But recently he started noticing something about the way books are treated that disturbed him. "Here in New York" - Robinson lives in a fairly intellectual part of Manhattan - "books are quite often left out in the street. If people are moving, they don't take their books with them."/ppThere may be a harmless explanation. Manhattan apartments are small. Some people always get rid of books once they've read them. Yet Robinson has some cause to see the phenomenon as a symptom of something ominous. On 3 December last year, despite what he describes as an editorial list "filled with erudite, well-written books", he abruptly lost his job at the American publisher Scribner./ppSo many other editors were sacked in New York that day, it almost instantly became known in the closely connected worlds of American and British publishing as "Black Wednesday". In recent months, such culls have become grimly routine in many industries. But among those who write, publish and sell serious non-fiction - the biographies, histories, travel and science books researched and written with a degree of subtlety for a general audience - the bad news seems to have been building up since long before the current recession./ppThe range of titles stocked by British libraries has been falling for decades. The net book agreement, which in effect subsidised the British book business, has been dead for a decade and a half. In that time, book retailers have concentrated increasingly on the genres that are easiest to sell. Book prices have collapsed. Within many publishers, sales and marketing considerations have come to trump editorial ones, and most authors of serious non-fiction have had to accept smaller advances and smaller print runs./ppMeanwhile, review space for their books in most newspapers has shrunk. The time their work spends on the shelves of bookshops has shortened. The competition for readers' attention - from the internet, from secondhand books sold online, from the seemingly ever-expanding celebrity culture - has sharpened. Bestsellers and "brand-name authors" squeeze out less established titles and writers more than ever before. Supermarkets and chain bookshops squeeze out independent booksellers. The number of books published in Britain - well over 100,000 a year and growing, five times as many as in 1970, which is far more than in comparable countries - means that all books fight for air. The computerisation of British bookselling, more advanced than almost anywhere in the world, casts an increasingly cold eye on serious books' commercial performance./ppAt the same time, wider cultural shifts - the evaporation of the idea of a literary canon, a less deferential attitude to experts, changing reading habits in the digital age - may be making serious, would-be definitive books less attractive to a broad public. Once-thriving serious genres such as political memoirs, literary biography and literary travel writing all appear to be ailing./pp"The fat years of the printed word are over," says John Sutherland, the academic and author of several books on the history of publishing. "Even if books get dirt cheap, readers simply don't have the time or motive to invest in them. The old cultivated readership is not as solid as it was. The safe library sale doesn't exist any more. There's been a loss of authority in the serious book." A former bookseller who is now a freelance literary publicist says: "There are plenty of good books going missing. Books that take five years to write. Publishers used to put them at the front of their catalogues. Nowadays the print runs are tiny for these books, about 2,000. Publishers say they can print more copies, but if they're printing 2,000 of something they're not going to get behind it. Because of publishers' falling profit margins, production values have gone down on some of these books. You're seeing paper that's turning yellow before it gets out of the shop. You've got publishers and literary agents blaming the bookshops and vice versa. You've got people going to literary festivals who'll pay pound;10 for a ticket to an author event but won't pay pound;20 for a history book."/ppNeil Belton, an editor at Faber with a long track record in serious non-fiction, is almost as bleak: "The book trade and publishing industry has embraced its inner philistine. The bigger book chains have semi-withdrawn from interest in serious books. The number of publishers that are committed to trying to bring these books to an audience is smaller. When they are interested in serious authors, the big publishing conglomerates are often chasing only the very big names, people established in their fields." The literary agent Peter Straus, previously a publisher at Picador, is also worried: "It is more and more difficult to place good books. Retail's changed. Advances have come down in the last two years. So many books haven't sold. There are too many books published. The harsh realities of the market will impinge on certain writers, certain publishers, certain agents."/ppIn his 2000 polemical history The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, the veteran American publisher Andreacute; Schiffrin calls this process "market censorship". But one person's market censorship is another person's market realism. Clare Alexander, like Straus a well-known agent previously involved in serious publishing, gives an example. "Between about 2003 and 2006, a lot of agents and publishers thought history was the new rock'n'roll. The advances people were paid were ridiculous: pound;100,000-plus for books that were not going to sell. Now the same sort of books are getting probably about pound;30,000. Some of the advances in serious non-fiction used to be seriously out of kilter." /ppUntil 2006, Scott Pack was the head buyer at Waterstone's, Britain's most dominant bookshop chain. "Historically, publishers have published too much of this [serious] stuff," he says. "Fifteen years ago, there were tens of millions of pounds of unsold stock sitting in bookshops. A publisher would put out a book on Henry VIII, say, and distribute 10,000 up and down the land. Then the publisher would be sitting there saying, 'We sold 10,000 - didn't we do great?', when really only 2,000 copies of the book ever sold. Nowadays bookselling is more professional, more commercial. It's not as nice ... A bookseller can return unsold books to the publisher after three months. Or if the book is in a three-for-two promotion, after four weeks ... But we see much better what the true sales of serious books are." /ppPack argues that those who fear for such titles in the modern marketplace are being snobbish and pessimistic. "In the last 10 years, the British book industry has been selling more books. More people are reading than ever before. Some of those extra readers are buying the kind of books you find in supermarkets - misery memoirs, mass-market crime - so, yes, the market share for heavyweight non-fiction will be smaller ... There used to be a lot of noise around these books. They were books made for great reviews. But people didn't want to buy them."/ppCurrently writing a book blog called Me And My Big Mouth, Pack is practised at making populist, intellectual-baiting arguments. Elsewhere in our interview, he dismisses upmarket publishers and reviewers as "the intelligentsia" and unsold books as "dead stock" and "rubbish". Yet he insists that it is still perfectly possible for a good, serious book to find a readership: "The vast majority are stocked in ones and twos. They can stick around, pick up word-of-mouth, sell steady."/ppHow such gradual success can be achieved given the ruthless stock control of the book chains is not something Pack explains. Yet some publishers of serious titles share his optimism. "The market for really good books has not diminished," says Stuart Proffitt, the publishing director of Penguin Press, identified by Schiffrin and others as a rare example of a corporate-owned publisher making a success of upmarket books. Proffitt cites Rosemary Hill's erudite biography of the Victorian architect Augustus Pugin, published by Penguin to great acclaim in 2007. So far it has sold more than 17,000 copies in hardback and paperback combined, according to Nielsen BookScan, the US market research corporation that records British book sales. David Kynaston's history of the Attlee era, Austerity Britain, has sold 65,000 copies; Kate Summerscale's reconstruction of a Victorian murder investigation, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, more than 305,000; Richard Dawkins's anti-religious polemic The God Delusion more than 687,000./ppProffitt concedes that such successes take more effort than they used to: "You have to think more carefully than ever before about every aspect of a book's publication, how it looks, how you communicate its existence." But he insists that the fears for serious books are overblown. "People in the book business are always saying there's a crisis and we're going to hell in a handbasket."/ppOn that point, at least, Proffitt has it over the doom-mongers. Book publishing is a melodramatic business: unpredictable, characterised by very public successes and failures, with even its seasoned practitioners consequently subject to sudden mood swings. In 1934, Geoffrey Faber, one of the founders of Faber, wrote despairingly: "The market is glutted. General publishing is therefore fast degenerating into a gambling competition for potential bestsellers." In 1979, the senior American publisher Jonathan Galassi warned that serious books were becoming "high-risk ventures for modern publishers who have inherited the overhead[s] of big business along with its management techniques and managers, and who have become increasingly reluctant to invest even very modest sums in projects which promise little in the way of immediate return". Non-academic publishing, he went on, may become "nothing more than the calculated marketing of slickly packaged materials, another 'leisure-time' industry ... unconnected to ... the intellectual and cultural roots of the society it purports to serve"./ppToday, such prophecies look both uncannily accurate and too apocalyptic. On the ground floor of the flagship branch of Waterstone's in Piccadilly, central London, the categories of goods on sale are listed on the wall as follows: "Bestsellers. Gift Wrap Cards. Humour. Indoor Games. London. Magazines. Maps. Travel. Travel Literature." A huge, mural-sized poster advertising an in-store event by the entertainer Rolf Harris dominates the main entrance. Where books are on display, many of them are in the three-for-two promotions that, once restricted to deals on baby wipes or orange juice in supermarkets, have become central over the last decade to the operation of British chain bookshops. /ppBut there is still serious non-fiction here and there. In recent weeks, there was a place in the front window for Iain Sinclair's chewy new history of Hackney, and a prominent table of thoughtful titles picked by Nick Hornby, including What Good Are the Arts? by the academic and critic John Carey. Esoteric history, the extended critical essay - both titles come from genres whose commercial prospects have been repeatedly written off./ppAnd yet, something is undeniably shifting in the climate for serious books. You can see it in the Piccadilly Waterstone's and in the other cavernous chain bookshops along nearby Charing Cross Road, the traditional heart of British bookselling. Carpets and shop-fittings are worn. Shelves are half-filled. Customers are sparse, even on a weekday lunchtime. There is less bustle, less atmosphere, in these shops than when they opened a decade ago. There is a sense that good times have come and gone./ppGood times have never been the norm for serious books in Britain. "From its very beginning, the publishing industry relied on books which could command a large market," writes John Feather in his still-relevant 1988 study A History of British Publishing. "The economics of production ... meant that it could not do otherwise." The 19th century brought mass literacy and a countrywide network of bookshops and publishers, but the business became ever more narrowly focused on producing commercial titles and selling them at a discount. "Booksellers could only afford to stock the most popular and fast-selling," writes Feather, "and had no space on the shelves for ... perhaps more worthwhile works which would sell more slowly and in smaller numbers. The bookshops ... were being squeezed out of business as a market mechanism for serious literature." By the 1890s, so many bookshops had closed and serious books were becoming so marginalised that a consensus formed that book discounting should be banned: the net book agreement was the result, and came into force on 1 January 1900./ppFor the next three-quarters of a century, British publishing and bookselling were diverse, slow-changing enterprises, relatively tolerant of high-minded books and "ramshackle to the cold business eye", as John Sutherland put it in a 1978 study of the book business. The arrival of state funding for libraries further softened the environment for cerebral writers. In 1965, Britons borrowed 10 books for every one they bought. "With any serious non-fiction book," says Clare Alexander, who entered publishing in 1973, "you knew you could sell 1,500 to the libraries." This enabled mainstream publishers to profitably put out books whose high-street sales were barely in the hundreds - and whose content can seem startlingly uncommercial by current standards. In 1975 Jonathan Cape published Leninism Under Lenin, a labyrinthine theoretical work by the Belgian Marxist historian Marcel Liebman. An equivalent work nowadays would be issued in Britain by a small academic press./ppYet the old British book business had its downsides. Bookshops were often dusty places, glacial in their book-ordering processes and off-putting to young or less educated customers. Even the influence of libraries, Sutherland argues, was not always benign: their preference for books that could be read in a fortnight, the standard lending time, helped keep postwar British writing terse and cramped./ppBut the tweediness of it all can be overstated. In 1935, in the middle of the depression, Penguin introduced the mass-market paperback to Britain, sold at first through branches of the brash American-owned chainstore Woolworth's, prefiguring today's supermarket book trade. Penguins were initially criticised as crassly commercial and middlebrow, yet soon became seen as a new, accessible form of quality publishing. In the late 1940s, the Better Books chain pioneered the idea of the bookshop as a bright and appealing space, "a social centre with a coffee bar, poetry readings and other literary events", notes Randall Stevenson in The Oxford English Literary History. Meanwhile, wider social changes, such as the growth of higher education, and technical bookselling ones - the introduction of "tele-ordering" in 1979, allowing books to be ordered in days rather than weeks or months - gradually created a bigger potential market for serious titles./ppIn the 1980s, that market finally materialised. Tim Waterstone was an unemployed man with six children who had already been a tea broker in India, a manager for a brewer and, most recently, the overseer of a disastrous attempt by WH Smith to set up a subsidiary in America, for which he had been fired. In 1982, he used his severance pay and money from friends and relations and the NatWest bank - the latter through the Conservative government's loan guarantee scheme for entrepreneurs - to set up a bookshop in a prosperous part of west London, which was relatively unaffected by the early 1980s recession. The rest of the Waterstone's story has long become bookselling legend: the new shop's daringly deep and heavyweight stock; its unfusty decor and helpful staff; its armchairs for browsers and friendly opening hours. For the next decade and a half, Waterstone's added branches, evangelised for "serious culture", as Waterstone characterised his books, and made literary biography and enigmatic travel writing seem viable high-street products. /ppNew readerships appeared. "In the 90s," says Sutherland, "just before the pension penalty for early retirement came in, there was a mass retirement of teachers. Suddenly, there was a vast number of extremely competent readers who had a lot of time."/ppThe book boom, too, was part of a broader cultural surge that produced the Independent, Channel 4 and scores of new television production companies. The free-market country being created by Margaret Thatcher, however much liberal writers might deplore its harshness, was opening up new possibilities for serious culture, while the non-market mechanisms that protected it, such as the net book agreement, remained largely in place. /ppDuring the 1990s this happy equilibrium between commerce and art in the British book business began to break down. By 1989, Waterstone's, like many new 1980s businesses, found that it had expanded too fast and borrowed too much money. Waterstone sold his bookshops to his old corporate foe, WH Smith. Gradually, over the next dozen years, the shops began to stock a narrower range of books./ppTo a certain extent, Waterstone's was responding to wider developments. Bestseller lists had been published in Britain since 1974, but it was only in the 1990s, with the belated installation of electronic point-of-sale technology in most bookshops, that accurate sales figures for every title became available. Meanwhile, British publishing, which had seen many of its old independent firms taken over by big corporations in the 1980s, had become much more business-oriented. By the mid-1990s, Neil Belton says, "a lot of bigger publishers were ambivalent about the net book agreement". Together with many booksellers, they thought that the freedom to discount titles would improve their profits. In 1995, the agreement in effect collapsed./ppThat same year, Amazon started selling books via the internet - making even the most rarefied titles universally available, at least in theory, but also offering books at deep discounts and beginning slowly to drain bookshops of their customers. By 2000, British bookselling was beginning to resemble its 19th-century self again: highly competitive, more interested in clever price promotions than clever books. That summer, Waterstone's sacked the manager of its popular Manchester branch, Robert Topping, for refusing to narrow his eclectic stock in favour of bestsellers./ppNine years on, Topping is still in bookselling. He owns and runs two shops, one in Ely in Cambridgeshire and one in Bath. If you like serious books but usually go to the chains, visiting a Topping shop is initially a shock, but then deeply reassuring. "Topping Company Booksellers of Ely" says the archly old-fashioned sign above the door. Inside, the front of the shop is full of solid biographies, footnoted histories, books on classical music, painting and religion. There are no price promotions, no author posters, no prominently displayed celebrity titles; just plain but expensive-looking wooden bookshelves, neatly jammed with books from the floor to the ceiling and covering every wall through three storeys of small rooms. If you are looking for a John Banville novel, there are seven titles, rather than the couple you usually find in a modern bookshop. If you like the late JG Ballard, there is his genial recent autobiography but also The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). There are newspaper reviews carefully cut and mounted on a pinboard./ppTopping is a vicar-ish man in cords and spectacles, but he is not some airy nostalgic. "In the age of the internet, you have to have as wide a stock as you can," he says. "I have to pay the bills myself, so I can see if it works." The computerisation of bookselling, he goes on, ought to help rather than harm serious books: "Distribution is faster, ordering is faster, so a shop can buy single copies and then restock." Is there any sort of serious book that he does think is becoming obsolete? He looks blank for a few moments. "There is this thought that the three-volume life doesn't work these days ..." He pauses again. "Does it work? I suppose not ... But if you believe enough, you can make a book sell."/ppHis shop is busy. Topping chose its site carefully: Ely is a pretty place full of tourists and retired academics, 20 miles from the nearest chain bookshop. But he thinks location is not central to selling serious books: "My hunch is you could do this anywhere."/ppBelton agrees. "I don't see any evidence that readers are unwilling to grapple with serious ideas in book form, as long as the book is readable. You always hear nonsensical things: 'People aren't interested in science books any more. People aren't interested in history.' That's so wrong. There will always be new subjects, new syntheses, in every field." Peter Straus adds: "In the early 90s, people said political memoirs didn't sell, and then there was Alan Clark's diaries. Anything's possible if the book's good enough." Clare Alexander says: "I don't think the readers of serious books have disappeared. What's happened is a breakdown in delivery. From October onwards - a quarter of the year - bookshop budgets are absorbed by celebrity books."/ppSome aspects of the life of a serious book have probably changed for good. Anyone who has been writing them for mainstream publishers in the last decade, as I have, will have sensed the new pressures and opportunities: to get your book into the shops at the optimum time of year, to be realistic about its commercial prospects, to promote it through the ever-multiplying media. Randall Stevenson, who is the head of English literature at Edinburgh University, is an advocate of picking your way through dense postmodern texts, yet he senses a new deference in non-fiction to impatient readers. "I read popular science, and it drives me round the bend, all the attention-grabbing and cute fact boxes." The packaging and titles of serious books may also sugar their contents a little more than they used to. Colin Robinson says: "There's quite a retro quality to even the most serious books now. Novels with an old-fashioned soldier on the cover. Books called The Lost City of X."/ppThe internet could have something to do with this. The American scientist Maryanne Wolf, in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), shows that how we read, and what we are easily able and therefore willing to read, is not set, but depends on the kind of texts we are used to interpreting. "I do wonder," she writes, "whether typical young readers view the analysis of text and the search for deeper levels of meaning as more and more anachronistic because they are so accustomed to the immediacy ... of on-screen information."/ppThis may be too pessimistic. Research into the internet's effect on reading is in its infancy. Despite decades of predictions to the contrary, the appetite for demanding non-fiction has survived the advent of newspapers, radio and television - and, in Britain, a popular culture with a particular ability to absorb talent and themes that in other countries would be channelled into grand state-of-the-nation volumes. In fact, many publishers think the noise and immediacy of the web will make slow, quiet immersion in a book seem more, not less, appealing. And books, unlike most digital media, are not directly dependent on recession-affected advertising revenues. /ppOther economic and social trends remain favourable: the growth of higher education; the proliferation of literary festivals; the falling costs of book production. Tellingly, more people than ever are writing books. "People are infatuated with the romance of writing," says Sutherland. "I can't tell you how many students of mine I recommend an agent to." Dying artforms tend not to attract so many new practitioners./ppThe crisis in serious non-fiction has probably been overdone. There is a crisis in British bookselling, thanks to the internet, the recession and the particular competitiveness of the British high street - Alexander cites the ever-increasing rents for retail premises. Some non-fiction genres, such as literary biography, are in decline, at least for now. But other serious genres, such as economics and nature writing, are on the rise. Most types of book go through these cycles of boom and bust. In unsettling times, books that try to explain the world may flourish./ppIn truth, it is too early to tell: serious non-fiction takes time to research and write and sell. But in the meantime, it may be a good idea for authors of such titles to be realistic about their place in the economic order. As John Feather writes in his history of British publishing, before Waterstone's, before agents and advances, before the invention of the modern book business: "The medieval author worked for himself, for God or for a patron, or indeed for all three." I'm not sure that career path would be so popular now./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/publishing"Publishing/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/biography"Biography/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/politics"Politics/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bCN-bmZWRoCrvb9J2IpJNFzehiA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bCN-bmZWRoCrvb9J2IpJNFzehiA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bCN-bmZWRoCrvb9J2IpJNFzehiA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/bCN-bmZWRoCrvb9J2IpJNFzehiA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/79617?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Connections+at+the+keyboardch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Poetry+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Adam+Neweyc7=2009_05_16c8=1216147c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Poetryc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FPoetryh2=GU%2FBooks%2FPoetryc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FPoetry%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216147%7CConnections+at+the+keyboard%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpLinking poems and pictures enhances both without feeling forced, says Adam Newey/ppThere may be, as the title of the Wallace Stevens poem has it, 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, but this collaboration between Paul Muldoon and the photographer Norman McBeath yields 28 perspectives on 10 poems, loosely gathered around the theme of life's cock-ups, contingencies and conspiracies. It would be wrong to think of the photographs as simply illustrative. /ppAs Muldoon says in his introduction, the poems were not created in response to the photographs, or vice versa, but rather the two elements were allowed to find their own oblique correspondences./ppMuldoon writes of McBeath's fine-grained photographs that they have an intense immediacy; "the medium does not impose a sense of mediation". /ppIn a typically Muldoonian shift, he says "there is, rather, an invitation to meditate". Look at a picture of a lone sheep in a field, say, or of a statue of Apollo swathed in polythene, and "the very idea of a 'subject' soon begins to seem crudely inappropriate"; or perhaps better to say that it ramifies in unexpected ways./ppThis is just the sort of pinball logic by which Muldoon's poems proceed. One could almost say that they resemble multiple-exposure photographs. The title poem delivers a concatenation of stories and images that loop past one another like chain links in a loose rondeau: seven linked sections take the reader from the old KGB headquarters in Vilnius to New York and back, via the great Talmudic scholar known as the Chazon Ish, Thomas Edison's public demonstration of the lethal power of alternating current (which he used to electrocute a Coney Island circus elephant) and the Prince of Wales's North American tour of 1860./ppSuch broad range of reference is typical of Muldoon's magpie intellect. It makes strenuous demands of the reader, but the way the sections of the poem are linked - through the most casual of throwaway phrases ("to have fetched up here") or a single repeated word - means that the connections never feel forced; it's rather like listening to a jazz pianist's modulation of key, in which a central motif is heard from different tonal angles. /ppMcBeath's images - there's one on each left-hand page - amplify the sense of serendipitous echo: an old knotted rope hanging from a granite wall opposite mention of a "KGB garotte" that "might well be a refinement of the Scythian torc"; in the final section, a derelict upright piano in the middle of a meadow rubs up against "a ball thrown in 1860 in honor of Edward // (then Prince of Wales)", and also recalls the "years of elocution and pianoforte" that begin the poem. Such are the degrees of connectedness that one starts to hear strains of the old Herbert Farjeon song, "I've danced with a man, who danced with a girl ... "/ppMuldoon's method is most evident in "Franccedil;ois Boucher: Arion on the Dolphin". Here he takes a very different kind of picture from McBeath's - the 18th-century painter's imagining of the myth of the Dionysiac poet and lyrist who was kidnapped by pirates and saved by a dolphin - as his starting point for a discursion on the "eye-linered and lip-glossed rock-god" Arion that takes in, among other things, The Raft of the Medusa, the French revolution, the imprisonment and death of the boy king Louis XVII and the various conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of JFK. Again, the poem turns on what looks almost like a slip of the typing finger:/pblockquotepthis sudden displacement of teakbr /suggesting the outlook's bleakbr /for both dolphin and Dauphin, spelling trouble br /for another figurehead who'll soon barely squeak/ppthrough the ranks of sans-culottes br /and the tumbrils' rough and tumble .../ppthrough the scumblebr /of pewter and pink on a distant grassy knoll./p/blockquotepThe dry humour is never far away, but there's true pathos, too, in poems that show a more personal side to Muldoon than he has revealed before. A couple of witty 14-liners, "A Mayfly" and "A Hummingbird", deal with lost love affairs, and a delightful disquisition on hare-lore also takes in a close friend's imminent death from cancer. In the end, the poem suggests that, for hare and human alike, it's a matter of will whether to "continue to tough it out till / something better comes along or settle for this salad of blaeberry and heather / and a hint of common tormentil". The savour of that bitter herb is apparent throughout this book, but Muldoon, one senses, will always be on the side of toughing it out./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry"Poetry/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/toXWBVtctZrEp0xVbTiNTsj-_L0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/toXWBVtctZrEp0xVbTiNTsj-_L0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/toXWBVtctZrEp0xVbTiNTsj-_L0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/toXWBVtctZrEp0xVbTiNTsj-_L0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/54416?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Pride+before+the+fallch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=History+%28Books+genre%29%2CBusiness+and+finance+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Business+Markets%2CNot+commercially+usefulc6=Richard+Lambertc7=2009_05_16c8=1216154c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Historyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FHistoryh2=GU%2FBooks%2FHistoryc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FHistory%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216154%7CPride+before+the+fall%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpRichard Lambert on the lessons policymakers might learn from the great depression/ppGordon Brown was not alone in claiming that economic booms and busts had become a thing of the past. In recent years, a growing number of senior economists agreed with the view expressed in 2003 by Robert Lucas, winner of the Nobel prize, who argued that the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes". Today, we are not so sure. As the global economy moves down its most dangerous spiral in more than 60 years, the causes and consequences of the great depression have become a subject of burning interest. Are there parallels with what's happening today, and what are the lessons to be learned?/ppIn a brilliant and timely book, Liaquat Ahamed provides some of the important answers. His conclusion is that the depression was not the result of mysterious forces that governments were powerless to resist. Rather, it was caused and compounded by a failure of intellectual will - a lack of understanding about how the economy operated. And he illustrates this with a mixture of compelling narrative, accessible economics and vivid insights./ppThe first and biggest set of errors flowed from the Paris peace conference at the end of the first world war. That saddled economies still devastated by war with an unimaginable burden of international debt - vast claims that festered through the next decade and beyond, poisoning international relations. Germany owed enormous sums in reparations to France and Britain, France was in hock to Britain and the US, and Britain in its turn also had huge debts to America. These capital imbalances were a fault line in the world's financial system, and when the pressure became too intense, they cracked./ppThe world's four most important central bankers, the principal characters of Ahamed's book, recognised the political blunders of the peace process and did what they could to deal with the consequences. But more than anyone else, they were also responsible for the second fundamental error of economic policy - the decision to return to the gold standard, at the wrong time and the wrong rate. The Bank of England's Montagu Norman was the first among equals. In the words of his French counterpart, he appeared "to have stepped out of a Van Dyck painting, elongated figure, pointed beard, a big hat ... Very mysterious, extremely complicated, one never knows the depths of his thoughts". Norman saw a return to the gold standard at the prewar rate as a matter of national pride, a moral commitment to those who had placed their assets and their trust in sterling. He could not accept the idea that the City of London should play second fiddle to anyone in the global capital markets. Short-term economic pain would be worth the financial long-term gain./ppSupporting him was his close friend Benjamin Strong of the US Federal Reserve. Committed to the idea of European reconstruction, he believed that a global return to the gold standard was a precondition of monetary stability, and that this would be possible only if Britain took the lead. Like Norman, he had a fragile constitution and took long periods of convalescence at key moments in the drama. His death in 1928 left a political vacuum within the US central bank that was to have serious consequences./ppMaking up the quartet of central bankers were Hjalmar Schacht of Germany - a man with an extraordinary capacity for making enemies, whose prominent support for the Nazi party was to take him all the way to the Nuremberg trials - and the wily Emile Moreau of France. Unlike Schacht, he was not close to Norman and the distrust was mutual. A Bank of England note-taker at their first meeting observed that he was "stupid, obstinate, devoid of imagination and generally of understanding, but a magnificent fighter for narrow and greedy ends"./ppThen there was John Maynard Keynes - incisive, hostile to those who attacked "the problems of the postwar world with unmodified prewar views and ideas", and almost always ignored. One of the great set pieces of the book is a dinner at 11 Downing Street in March 1925. Chancellor Winston Churchill is trying to make up his mind about the gold standard: Norman, whom Churchill could not stand, is not invited, so senior treasury officials argue his corner. Keynes makes the case against gold, but tragically is not on best form. As the night wears on and the alcohol flows, Churchill is swayed by the idea that failure to act would be seen as a public admission of Britain's diminished role in the world. The final word of the night goes to Reginald McKenna, a banker and former Liberal chancellor. "There is no escape. You will have to go back; but it will be hell."/ppThe price of that dinner was economic catastrophe - first in Britain and then more generally. The world's gold reserves were inadequate to take the strain. Because sterling had gone in at the wrong rate, the Bank of England was under constant pressure and Britain's manufacturers were priced out of their export markets. Ahamed argues that the four central bankers were able to keep the show on the road only by holding US interest rates down and keeping Germany afloat on borrowed money. The Fed was torn between two conflicting objectives: to keep propping up Europe by cutting interest rates, or to control speculation on Wall Street by raising them. It was a system that was bound to come to a crashing end./ppWhat are the lessons for today from what followed? There are at least five. The first is to act decisively when the trouble starts, and to co-operate internationally. After Strong's death, the Fed appeared paralysed in the key months of 1929, and France and Britain were constantly feuding with each other. Another is to do whatever it takes to stem the flood tides. The Fed cut interest rates sharply after Wall Street crashed, but stopped easing much too soon in the summer of 1930. Like central banks across Europe, it also failed to build a firewall to stop bank runs./ppA third priority is to keep capital flowing across borders to wherever it is most needed. Ahamed believes the failure to do this was even more damaging than the effect of trade protectionism. Currency competition was another major contributor to the disaster. Moreau's strategy of pegging the franc at a low rate brought gold flooding into France. While there were 4.5 million people on the dole in Germany and another 2 million in Britain, France had only 190,000 on unemployment benefit. /ppThe final lesson is that it's vital to fix the capital imbalances. Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931, and its recovery started that year. The US followed in 1933, which marked the low point in its depression. Only Germany clung on to gold, and was dragged down with it into political turmoil. /ppToday's policymakers have learned from these dreadful mistakes, but they still have more to do to restore economic stability and bring down unemployment. They need to read this book./pp• Richard Lambert is director general of the CBI/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/history"History/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/businessandfinance"Business and finance/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/zo5MYf5LCDKaycHSVjT0MCkHlHw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/zo5MYf5LCDKaycHSVjT0MCkHlHw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/zo5MYf5LCDKaycHSVjT0MCkHlHw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/zo5MYf5LCDKaycHSVjT0MCkHlHw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/36178?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Darkness+and+lightch=Booksc3=The+Guardianc4=Fiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Robin+Yassin-Kassabc7=2009_05_16c8=1216205c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Fictionc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionh2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Gdn%3A+Review+Saturday+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FFiction%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216205%7CDarkness+and+light%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpRobin Yassin-Kassab wonders if this is the first Great Syrian Novel/ppSyria, more than most, is a land of stories and storytellers. The farmers and shopkeepers describe early Islamic battles or episodes from the Crusades as if they'd attended them in person. A gathering of friends is quickly elevated into a group performance of jokes, laments, myths and conspiracies. Even Syrian surnames suggest stories: there are families called The-Milk's-Boiled, Sip-The-Yoghurt and Undone-Belt. "The deeper you swim into our stories," a village rhetorician once told me, "the more you understand that they have no floor."/ppYet Syria is better known for its poets, and its TV dramas, than for its novelists. Egypt, with its unending metropolis, is the home of the Arabic novel, and Egypt produced the Arabs' master of fiction, Naguib Mahfouz. But a flame equally bright now burns from Damascus, via Germany, as shown by what may turn out to be the first Great Syrian Novel./ppIn The Dark Side of Love, Rafik Schami exploits all the resources of the classic realist novel and then goes a little further, forging a new form out of Syrian orality. His basic unit is not chapter or paragraph, but story; a thousand bejewelled anecdotes and tales are buried here, ready to spring, but each is melded with such dazzling surety into the whole that reading the book is always compulsive. In its final, self-exposing passage, Schami compares his method to mosaic work, in which every shiny object is a beauty in itself, yet which in combination, at a distance, reveals a still greater beauty. The novel is even Tolstoyan in its marrying of the personal, social and political spheres, of private with national life./ppIt starts with an unsolved murder. "Knowledge is a lock," says a policeman, "and the key to it is a question, but we're not allowed to ask questions in this country ... which is why there isn't a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions."/ppCommissioner Barudi dares to ask. The answer is an epic of violent enmity between families, and between clashing ideas of love. The first idea is easily stated: "Love in Arabia depends more on what your identity card says than the feelings of your heart."/pp"Identity card" means religion and sect and, more fundamentally, the all-powerful clan - that haven of solidarity and comfort which "saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them". In the mountain village of Mala, the Catholic Mushtaks and the Orthodox Shahins feud and kill for honour and revenge. In nearby Damascus, Farid Mushtak and Rana Shahin prefer the approach of Syria's greatest Sufi saint, Ibn Arabi, who cried: "Love is my religion!" As with Romeo and Juliet, or Layla and Majnun, Farid and Rana's romance shines secretly, ill-fatedly. It is a compelling and complete love story./ppSchami's Mala is on a par with Maacute;rquez's Macondo for colour and resonance, although nothing more magical than real life happens here - only seductions and insanities, a visit by a dangerously drunk president, a peasant uprising, a bandit siege./ppDamascus, "a lost luggage office" refined and trampled by 40 civilisations over 8,000 years, is experienced through its cafeacute;s, hammams and homes, its puppet shows, Eid festivals and hunger riots, via the underground press, a boxing match and a brothel. The canvas is vast and closely painted. It feels encyclopedic, in psychological observation as well as social breadth./ppThere are no faux-magical pyrotechnics in the telling, but richly detailed characters working through real situations, characters whose inherited wounds the reader comes to care deeply about. Each is vividly drawn, with quiet and acute intelligence. The patriarch George Mushtak is an elemental force; so, too, is his philandering, repenting son, Elias. Farid, who we know best of all, grows by enduring a tyrannical father, Israeli bombs and a "political" prison camp./ppThe Dark Side of Love is a fiction that accurately (if selectively) documents Syrian social history. Its sweep reaches from 1907 to 1970, through the French occupation, the chaotic coup years, the rise of the Ba'ath and the disastrous June war. Farid and Rana swim on the great currents of 20th-century Syrian thought - communism, feminism, nationalism, Islamism - and witness the poisoning of the waters. Farid's torture scenes are painfully, brilliantly narrated. Relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims, between the countryside and the city, between men and women, and between political factions, are explored with subtlety and honesty./ppIt is translated very well from the German, although annoying Germanic orthography remains - so that Yusuf is written "Jusuf" and the Damascus quarter Muhajireen becomes "Muhayirin". And perhaps a glossary of dictators' names would have been useful. Schami disguises the actual characters with names whose comic impact will be lost on those who don't speak Arabic: Abdul Nasser, for instance, is called Satlan, which means "stoned"./ppThe weakest part of the book is its title. The Dark Side of Love illumines almost every side of love, as well as fear, longing, cruelty and lust. Darkness and light alternate like the basalt and marble stripes on Damascene walls, and the novel's structure is just as strong. A book like this requires a less limiting title. I suggest something as expansive, as comprehensive, as War and Peace./pp• Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h7b6W_s8x7bxUw9EV7ofxbz03Uc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h7b6W_s8x7bxUw9EV7ofxbz03Uc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h7b6W_s8x7bxUw9EV7ofxbz03Uc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/h7b6W_s8x7bxUw9EV7ofxbz03Uc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/88164?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Pamuk+%27insult+to+Turkishness%27+claims+return+to+courtch=Booksc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Orhan+Pamuk+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Alison+Floodc7=2009_05_15c8=1216460c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Orhan+Pamukc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FOrhan+Pamukh2=GU%2FBooks%2FOrhan+Pamukc13=c10=News+%28Tone%29c25=c26=c27=editorialc42=Books%2FOrhan+Pamuk%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216460%7CPamuk+%27insult+to+Turkishness%27+claims+return+to+court%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpPersonal damages claims against Nobel laureate, for remarks about Armenian and Kurdish deaths, ruled legitimate/ppNobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is facing compensation claims in Turkey over remarks he made to a Swiss magazine in 2005./pp/ppPamuk said in the February 2005 interview that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it." He was charged and tried for "public denigration of Turkish identity" under Article 301 of the penal code later that year, but the case was subsequently dropped in the wake of international outrage./pp/ppHowever, a href="http://www.bianet.org/english/minorities/114518-supreme-court-allows-compensation-claims-against-orhan-pamuk" title="http://www.bianet.org/english/minorities/114518-supreme-court-allows-compensation-claims-against-orhan-pamuk"Turkish newspapers were reporting today/a that six people – including the nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, who has filed cases in the past against Pamuk and the murdered journalist Hrant Dink, and who is currently detained in a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/turkey-ergenekon" title=""the Ergenekon trial/a – have been given leave to demand 36,000 lira (£15,000) in compensation from the celebrated author of My Name is Red and Snow. Their case, which claims personal damages arising from the "insult" to Turkishness, has been rejected twice previously, but was yesterday upheld by the country's highest appeals court. The case will now be reassessed./pp/pp"The worrying thing is that this whole thing keeps coming back into the public eye. It's been clear right from the beginning that the purpose of the original prosecution wasn't to put him in prison, but was just to get publicity," said Pamuk's translator Maureen Freely. "Every time this thing comes up it's another opportunity for the nationalist press to restate their position about what they think of Orhan and the other 301 defendants ... For Orhan himself, this had gone onto the back burner, and now it's come back onto the front again."/pp/ppAt International PEN, director of the Writers in Prison committee Sara Whyatt said it was "extremely unlikely" there would be a positive outcome for the complainants. Freely agreed. "I'd be very surprised if he had to pay damages and very surprised to find this judgment sticks," she said. "The only thing we can be certain about is that anything which keeps his name in the papers, or the names of other well known 301 defendants in the papers, is going to give oxygen to nationalist publicity."/pp/ppWhyatt pointed to another Turkish author, the France-based Nedim Gürsel, who is being tried under Article 216 (3) of the Turkish penal code for "incitement to enmity or hatred" – like Pamuk, following complaints by private individuals. His book, Daughters of Allah, is alleged to "humiliate the religious values of part of the population", and Gürsel is facing up to one year in prison. According to International PEN, although at the opening hearing of the trial on 5 May the prosecutor stated there was no evidence the book was inciting hatred, the case is still being taken to the criminal court on 26 May./pp/pp"The main problem in this case as well as that of Pamuk and other writers who are in similar situations is the wide range of laws that either directly curtail free speech, or can be interpreted in such a way. This allows not only state institutions but also individuals to make complaints that then must at least be considered by the judicial authorities. These complaints are very rarely successful, and indeed, as in the Gürsel hearing, even the prosecution will at times say there is no case," said Whyatt. "Our concern is that while the likelihood of successful prosecution of these writers is relatively low, the existence of numerous articles in Turkish legislation allows for individuals to use them to harangue writers who are forced to spend time and resources defending themselves. We have long been calling for an overhaul of Turkish legislation to remove all articles and clauses that allow for this kind of harassment."/pp/ppFreely is currently in the process of translating Pamuk's new novel, The Museum of Innocence, a book which she said has become a bestseller in Turkey, changing and improving Pamuk's standing in the country. "His enemies had portrayed him as a traitor, but it's so clear that he's not from this new book," she said. "It's a very Turkish book, a tribute or a farewell to an Istanbul and Turkey that's no longer there, and it's been received as such."/pp/ppDue out in September in the UK from Faber Faber, The Museum of Innocence is the story of one man's lifelong unrequited love. "It's about virginity, about the policing of women who don't follow the rules," said Freely. "It's very controversial in its way, putting down things that have never been admitted to before by a male writer."/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/orhanpamuk"Orhan Pamuk/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4FuCHxw6MFivbPpdZuU1qvMTSa4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4FuCHxw6MFivbPpdZuU1qvMTSa4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4FuCHxw6MFivbPpdZuU1qvMTSa4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/4FuCHxw6MFivbPpdZuU1qvMTSa4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

pThe death of John Updike in January sparked much talk about the end of the golden age of American fiction. In her timely new history of American women writers, A Jury of her Peers, Elaine Showalter challenges the assumption that the most important writers are male. /ppShe explains why American women writers lag so far behind their English sisters in public estimation, and tells the colourful stories of some of the earliest storytellers - women such as Mary Rowlandson, captured by Narragansett Indians in the 17th century. She points out the writers you should read, and those you needn't bother with. Finally she names her four must-reads for anyone who wants to know about women in American literature./pp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MjgZq7fDKS5XEceWIzlhSN52N3Q/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MjgZq7fDKS5XEceWIzlhSN52N3Q/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MjgZq7fDKS5XEceWIzlhSN52N3Q/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/MjgZq7fDKS5XEceWIzlhSN52N3Q/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/79212?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Poster+poems%3A+The+book+of+the+blog+is+on+its+waych=Booksc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Poetry+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+section%2CPublishing+%28Books%29c5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Billy+Millsc7=2009_05_15c8=1216163c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=blogc13=c14=Books+blogh2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blogh2=GU%2FBooks%2Fblog%2FBooks+blogc13=Poster+poems+%28Books+blog+series%29c10=Blogpost+%28Tone%29c25=Books+blogc26=c27=editorialc42=Books%2Fblog%2FBooks+blog%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1216163%7CPoster+poems%3A+The+book+of+the+blog+is+on+its+way%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpOur humble series will soon be going into print, but first I need our poets to get in touch and our readers to point out any omissions/ppPoster poems: the blog that just won't go away. a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/13/poster-poems-anthologies"When we put together the online anthology a few weeks ago/a, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea of a print anthology to match./ppWell, the good news is that the fine folk in the Guardian shared that enthusiasm, and are planning to publish a Poster poems anthology as a print-on-demand book. I've been pondering what should go in it; for the most part, the poems I've earmarked for inclusion are taken from the anthology thread as picked by you, and here's the full list:/ppAdrianHula: New Orderbr /alarming: "A poem is like an iceberg" and "I love you best"br /anytimefrances: you are your house and a failed housewife deserts the propertybr /arsenelupin: Unlucky At Cardsbr /artpepper: On My Sleeping Wife, Who Makes Men Clumsy and A Sestina for Wallace Stevensbr /BaronCharlus: Not Everyone Gets a Sequel and Dunwichbr /CaptainNed: change lobsters and An Alien Remembers Its Birthbr /CarolRumens: Sunset for the Under-Fivesbr /Cherryfranklin: "You who were born"br /creel: "Dance implies a symmetry"br /Crikfan: Then call it a love letterbr /crisosto: My modest world br /cynicalsteve: "These are the wanderings of the poet Wordsworth" and "The question is: why write in sonnet style?"br /deadgod: Endorphins: A Gamble on Gambolbr /degrus: "A true gardener is a man"br /dickensdesk: "Walking down this lane"br /drewd1: "I love the year's decline, and love to see"br /elcalifornio: Virginia Darebr /Flarf: togetherbr /freepoland: An Aged Man Waits for the Morning and Opus Dei br /floribunda: "He would throw off his donkey jacket"br /fourfoot: "You do not see clocks in shops anymore"br /graceandreacci: Porthcurno and Invulnerable Children br /HamishSweeney: "You'll die before your time they said"br /HenryLloydMoon: april showers in borrowdale and Saturn Vbr /herdwicktup: After The Funeral Partybr /Iamnothere: Next time you view the whitebr /Ishouldapologize: "Swear off nostalgia" and Approaching Belfastbr /Jantar: And on the roofsbr /JulianGough: Dromineer, December 2007br /LaxativeFunction: "Was it me who left"br /MeltonMowbray: the Is this the autumn of our love? trilogy and Union Street, Saturday night and Sunday morning.br /MrStevenAugustine: the fine arts in berlinbr /motherofgod: Saint Davidsbr /mvide: "I am ever disappointed in Bucharest."br /norwegianwood: Housesbr /obooki: "Our office is very wide."br /ofile: Sun Salutationbr /parallaxview: The Dashing Good Soldierbr /Parisa: Quiet as Snow in the City and "Dear ant"br /Pinkerbell: Dreaming...br /pinkroom: Fibonacci snowfalls and The last pfenningbr /RobertLock: Home thoughts from another planet and "Celsius reaches double figures"br /roomwithaview: The sudden ageing of a workerbr /ruhooper: Summer night, Sligobr /SirTopaz: As I walked out one morningbr /smpugh: This is just to saybr /stoneofsilence: Tango and for my dear beloved niecebr /suzanabrams: Hanging the Laundrybr /sylvianew: Skin Sheddingbr /thebeardedlady: Keep things simple when throwing a sickiebr /thebookofsand: Inward bound and Salarybr /3potato4: "i love the way the sun"br /TyrannosaurusAlan: Trainspottingbr /UnPublishedWriter: Sonnet without a causebr /Unsinkmolly: College as new home, a honeymoon and three haiku ("Glass branches glisten"/ "Snowflake calm descends"/ "Friends extend heart-hearths.")br /wheelchairbarbie: "For SJB, who discovered peace too late"br /whitstable5: "My mother was going blind"br /Woofsson: "Those who the gods would drive mad,"br /zephirine: "Does madam prefer still or sparkling water?" and "I wish that money liked me more"br /zombus: "I happen later in a dream"/ppBut before this can go any further, there's work to be done. First up, I need all the poets on this list to email Sarah Crown (sarah.crown@guardian.co.uk) to confirm the poem or poems in question are your work and give permission to include them in the anthology. You also need to consider what name you want to publish under and maybe send a very brief bio to go in the book. If you're in touch with anyone else on the list who you think might miss this blog, can you let them know about it?/ppEqually importantly, I want to know if there are any poets or poems that I've missed but that you feel strongly should be included. Just post a comment to let me know; it's not too late to add more good work./ppThe timelines are tight; let's get cracking. Ideally, the book should be available in early June; it should make the perfect holiday reading this summer.br //pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry"Poetry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/publishing"Publishing/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8oI7vstBfK_52noTyBC5AD_E0E8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8oI7vstBfK_52noTyBC5AD_E0E8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8oI7vstBfK_52noTyBC5AD_E0E8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/8oI7vstBfK_52noTyBC5AD_E0E8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/32397?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Colombian+civil+war+story+wins+Independent+foreign+fiction+prizech=Booksc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Independent+foreign+fiction+prize+%28Books%29%2CAwards+and+prizes+%28Culture%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Film+Awards%2CNot+commercially+usefulc6=Alison+Floodc7=2009_05_15c8=1215854c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Independent+foreign+fiction+prizec13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FIndependent+foreign+fiction+prizeh2=GU%2FBooks%2FIndependent+foreign+fiction+prizec13=c10=News+%28Tone%29c25=c26=c27=editorialc42=Books%2FIndependent+foreign+fiction+prize%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1215854%7CColombian+civil+war+story+wins+Independent+foreign+fiction+prize%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpEvilio Rosero's The Armies hailed as 'a beautifully wrought, gently spoken novel of love, war and grief'/ppA brutal but beautiful novel about life in Colombia in the midst of the civil war which has ravaged the country for decades has won the Independent foreign fiction prize./ppEvelio Rosero, a prize-winning author in his own country but hardly known outside it, this evening became the first Colombian author to win the prize, picking it up for a book which judges praised as "a beautifully wrought, gently spoken novel of love, war and grief". The Armies is set in a village in the remote mountains of Colombia, following the story of a retired schoolteacher whose wife disappears; as more people go missing and war approaches, the other villagers make their escape, but Ismael stays behind, becoming a reluctant witness to the violence that is sweeping his country./pp"It's a stunning novel of the Colombian conflict – it's so beautifully told, it reads like a classic," said its translator Anne McLean, who takes home half of the £10,000 prize money. "Most of the events – the shock horror events in the novel – are taken from news stories. It's not a comfortable read, but it is a page-turner and he somehow makes it universal even though it's so Colombian."/ppRosero, who speaks no English, said winning the prize had persuaded him to keep on writing. "This recognition comes as very welcome and timely news as I find myself halfway through a novel that I've been tackling for several months now," he said in a translated statement. "At the stage when one doesn't know whether to keep writing or run away, the Independent foreign fiction prize has encouraged me to opt for the former."/ppHe also thanked McLean, an "unsurpassable translator of Spanish-speaking writers", for "the beautiful English she made out of my anguish and love for my country"./ppChair of judges Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of the Independent, said The Armies "not only laments the Colombian people's tragedy but celebrates the universal but always fragile virtues of everyday life and speaks of terrible events with a precision and humanity that earn the reader's affection as well as respect". McLean's translation, meanwhile, "captures every shade and nuance of this story in words that match gravity and grace"./ppWinning the prize for a second time – McLean first picked it up in 2004 for her translation of Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas – was "unbelievable", the translator said. "I was so shocked that both my books made the shortlist, so to have actually won is really flabbergasting."/ppMcLean, who also translated the shortlisted The Informers by another Colombian writer, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, said there was "a lot of good fiction coming out of Colombia". "It seems to be a good time for Colombian fiction," she said. "Evelio Rosero has won all the major prizes in Colombia but this is only his second novel to be published in Spain, where he's been a revelation – everyone's saying 'who is this guy?'"/ppAlso on the shortlist were Beijing Coma by exiled Chinese writer Ma Jian, Albanian Ismail Kadare's The Siege, debut French novelist Céline Curiol's Voice Over and Israeli writer AB Yehoshua's Friendly Fire. Tonkin was joined on the judging panel by novelist Linda Grant, Arts Council England literature officer Kate Griffin, Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson and readysteadybook.com blogger Mark Thwaite./ppAntonia Byatt, literature director at the Arts Council, which runs the award in association with the Independent, said the choice of The Armies as winner illustrated the importance of fiction in translation. "Who would want to miss such a poignant and powerful book? A book that not only tells us about how life is torn apart in a country wrought be war, but also adds to our understanding of the human condition," she said. "I am delighted more novels in translation than ever were entered for the prize this year, proof that we are waking up to the hugely rich quality of fiction written in other languages."/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/independentforeignfictionprize"Independent foreign fiction prize/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/awards-and-prizes"Awards and prizes/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e-PYuFv87XjYURHVFgF-J6bLSNo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e-PYuFv87XjYURHVFgF-J6bLSNo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e-PYuFv87XjYURHVFgF-J6bLSNo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/e-PYuFv87XjYURHVFgF-J6bLSNo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/71759?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Catcher+in+the+Rye+sequel+published%2C+but+not+by+Salingerch=Booksc3=guardian.co.ukc4=JD+Salinger+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Alison+Floodc7=2009_05_14c8=1215733c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=JD+Salingerc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FJD+Salingerh2=GU%2FBooks%2FJD+Salingerc13=c10=News+%28Tone%29c25=c26=c27=editorialc42=Books%2FJD+Salinger%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1215733%7CCatcher+in+the+Rye+sequel+published%2C+but+not+by+Salinger%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpHolden Caulfield returns in an unauthorised sequel by debut novelist/ppThe last we saw of Holden Caulfield, he was in a mental hospital in California, reminiscing about the days he spent roaming New York City, watching his sister Phoebe ride a carousel. Now JD Salinger's much-loved teenage misanthrope is back, thanks to an unauthorised sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, which sees a 76-year-old "Mr C" flee a nursing home to journey again through the streets of New York./pp/pp"I open my eyes and, just like that, I'm awake," is the opening line of Swedish American writer John David California's 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, just out from tiny publisher Windupbird Publishing. "I suppose it's pretty damn early, but it must still be the middle of the night. It's so dark I can hardly see my goddamned hand in front of my face."/pp/pp"Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York," said California. "It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past. He's still Holden Caulfield, and has a particular view on things. He can be tired, and he's disappointed in the goddamn world. He's older and wiser in a sense, but in another sense he doesn't have all the answers."/pp/ppJD Salinger himself, to whom the book is dedicated – "To ... the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life" – is also a character in the novel, battling with himself over what to do with the teenager who has gripped millions of readers from his very first words: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."/pp/ppThe Salinger character in California's novel muses that Caulfield is "like a piece of paper upon which you have once started a story, and then locked in a box and buried deep in the ground. Now, 60 years later, you dig that same box up and continue the story from where the last sentence ended."/pp/ppCalifornia said he was moved to write the book – his first - because he'd "always wondered what happened to [Caulfield] ... he deserves to have another life than just his 16 years". He'd tried, he added, to be "very respectful" to both Caulfield and Salinger's status as "American icons". "I thought about it and tried to handle it very delicately. I like the story and Holden and I wanted to keep it respectful."/pp/ppThe famously reclusive Salinger, who withdrew from public life in the 1950s, hasn't given permission for the sequel. "Maybe he will get upset, but I'm hoping he will be pleased," said California. "I'm not trying to lure him out of hiding – maybe he wants his privacy [but] it would be fun for me to hear what he thinks about this, and if he's pleased with the way I've portrayed Holden Caulfield and his future."/pp/ppSalinger, however, has blocked all attempts to publish any of his writings not available before 1965, hindered would-be biographers, and kept his work out of Hollywood ever since the 1950 movie version of his short story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, My Foolish Heart, was panned by the critics. Perhaps California shouldn't hold his breath for a fairytale ending./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/jdsalinger"JD Salinger/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2PQfGKFTfcYk3BGsrOLEQKuEplE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2PQfGKFTfcYk3BGsrOLEQKuEplE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2PQfGKFTfcYk3BGsrOLEQKuEplE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2PQfGKFTfcYk3BGsrOLEQKuEplE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/56242?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Stephen+Smith%27s+top+10+subterranean+booksch=Booksc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Best+books%2CBooks%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Stephen+Smithc7=2009_05_12c8=1213847c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Best+booksc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FBest+booksh2=GU%2FBooks%2FBest+booksc13=Top+10s+%28Books%29c10=Feature+%28Tone%29c25=c26=c27=editorialc42=Books%2FBest+books%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213847%7CStephen+Smith%27s+top+10+subterranean+books%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpFrom HG Wells and Jules Verne to a history of the London tube, the author digs out the very best in underground reading/ppStephen Smith is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, and is culture correspondent for BBC Newsnight. He is the author of several books, including Cuba: Land of Miracles and Underground London. /ppHis new book, Underground England, travels the length, breadth and depth of the country in search of wonders both natural and man-made, from smugglers' tunnels to Knights Templar chapels./ppa href="http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9781408700563"Buy Underground England at the Guardian bookshop/a/pp"Just about the most counter-productive thing you can say to another human being is "Don't look down!" Tate Modern has never seen crowds like it had for Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth, a crack in the ground that visitors couldn't resist lowering a foot – or a emface /em– into. I suspect that my interest in the subterranean began in the subconscious, in an attempt to answer the question at the back of all our minds: what's down there?/pp"Day to day, we orientate ourselves in what you might call a lateral fashion: let's meet at the pub next to the park, and so on. But I'm fascinated by the under-explored emvertical /emdimension of our surroundings. How much more intriguing to consider what is under the pub – perhaps a secret tunnel once used by the highwayman Dick Turpin in order to stay one step ahead of his pursuers (as is rumoured to be the case at Jack Straw's Castle pub on Hampstead Heath). You could be forgiven for thinking that this is an underground interest in more ways than one. So I thought I'd dig out a few gems from my troglodyte treasury, to show you that many distinguished authors have sunk to startling depths to produce books about the subterranean." /ph21. Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner/h2pSmuggling was practised not only on the Spanish Main but around our sceptr'd Isle. At New Brighton, Merseyside, where my family is from, the privateers salted their booty away beneath the butter-soft sandstone. Moonfleet contains my emcri de coeur/em: "I believe there never was a boy yet who saw a hole in the ground, or a cave in a hill, or much more an underground passage, but longed incontinently to be into it and discover whither it led."/ph22. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne/h2pJules Verne's evergreen page-turner is a reminder that the best adventures may be right under our noses, or rather the soles of our feet. The author described the breathtaking feats of underground engineering achieved by the natural world: "a succession of arches appeared before us like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral; here the architects of the Middle Ages might have studied all the forms of that religious architecture which developed from the pointed arch."/ph23. The Underground Man by Mick Jackson/h2pA man in Hackney, east London, was recently dubbed the Mole Man for tunnelling under his neighbours' houses. Mick Jackson's real-life model for this novel, the fifth Duke of Portland, was a Mole Man born to the ermine (not inappropriately, you may think, as ermine like to burrow.) He created a sunken ballroom under his ducal seat. He insisted that his servants kept a chicken roasting at all hours of the day, and had it brought to him on heated wagons through underground passages. Jackson brilliantly ventriloquises his lordship in this novel, but the truth is unfathomably stranger than fiction. /ph24. The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar/h2pThe history of the London tube, the first underground train network in the world. Dirty, stuffy, run for the benefit of private business rather than the poor bloody passengers – and it was just as bad when it started! Christian Wolmar knows more about the railways than the men who run them – on second thoughts, that's not quite the compliment it was intended to be./ph25. The Lore of the Land by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson/h2pThough not confined to the subterranean, this essential gazetteer of folklore is chokka with secret passages, buried treasure and the strange tolling of sunken church bells. The book shows that the same myths recur around the country, including the legend of the plucky violinist who enters a forbidding tunnel. The music suddenly stops and the fiddler's never heard of again. A veritable Crufts of shaggy dog stories./ph26. Haweswater by Sarah Hall/h2pSarah Hall's justly praised debut novel is set in the lost village of Mardale in the Lake District. It was so cut off that when anyone died, the body was carried over the fells on a Corpse Road to the nearest graveyard. Mardale finally got its own consecrated plot, but then it was decided to submerge the whole village under Haweswater to create a reservoir. So the dead of Mardale were dug up and taken to join their ancestors. On hot summer days, the dry stone walls of Mardale eerily reappear. /ph27. The Dig by John Preston/h2pFor years, people wondered what was in the extraordinary burrows at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. They were on land owned by the wealthy Edith Pretty. A clairvoyant told her that her late husband wanted the mounds excavated. The task fell not to Tony Robinson and the gadget-toting Time Team but a horny-handed countryman called Basil Brown, who uncovered the remains of an Anglo-Saxon king. Preston's novel is a deft excavation of the class snobberies surrounding the historic 1930s dig. /ph28. Selected Caves of Britain and Ireland by Des Marshall Donald Rust /h2pThe Baedeker of the below-ground world, this is a must for cavers, an excellent primer for novices and deliciously gooseflesh-raising for those who haven't the slightest intention of going anywhere near a pothole. It was my invaluable companion on a descent of Long Churn in the Yorkshire Dales, which was first tamed in 1848 by "J Birkbeck and party" and is described in this Michelin guide to Middle Earth as "a fine though heavily used cave"./ph29. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe/h2p"Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars," wrote Defoe. "The bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stocked with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends." Knowing that the great Defoe had been there before me enhanced my pleasure in keeping alive the tradition of troglodyte tippling in Nottingham, at a pub called The Trip to Jerusalem which was quarried out of the city's Castle Rock. /ph210. The Time Machine by HG Wells/h2pOne of the finest works of science fiction set in the subterranean. In the dystopian future imagined by Wells, the Morlocks are a race who lived below ground. In researching my book, I was amazed to find that some of my fellow countrymen have made similar lifestyle choices to the Morlocks. It's no slight on the good people of Wolverley in the West Midlands to say that they're cavemen. There, a des res called Rock House was on the market, carved out of a cliff face and a snip at £25,000./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/bestbooks"Best books/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6pHpnASAzZIZTovBhCjXF2oDrGA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6pHpnASAzZIZTovBhCjXF2oDrGA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6pHpnASAzZIZTovBhCjXF2oDrGA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/6pHpnASAzZIZTovBhCjXF2oDrGA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/92177?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Heartbreak+in+five+movementsch=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=Kazuo++Ishiguro+%28Author%29%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Tom+Flemingc7=2009_05_10c8=1213113c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Kazuo++Ishiguroc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FKazuo++Ishiguroh2=GU%2FBooks%2FKazuo++Ishiguroc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Arts+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FKazuo++Ishiguro%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213113%7CHeartbreak+in+five+movements%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpKazuo Ishiguro's spellbinding tales speak of frustration and regret, writes Tom Fleming/ppIn "Cellists", the final, exquisite story in Kazuo Ishiguro's new collection, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. "You have to understand, I am a virtuoso," she tells him. "But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped." For her, and for many other characters in the book, music represents an ideal self that has little to do with reality. In the end, she marries someone she does not love, while the young Hungarian takes a second-rate job playing in a chamber group at a hotel restaurant. They both remain unfulfilled. This is, perhaps, what most binds these stories: the conflict between what music promises and what life delivers./ppNocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative. The opening story, "Crooner", establishes a mood of quiet melancholy. Tony Gardner, an ageing American singer, comes to Venice with his wife, Lindy. He hires Jan, a guitarist from a band in the Piazza San Marco, to accompany him while he serenades his wife from a gondola beneath their hotel window./ppJan, the narrator, is thrilled to be in Gardner's company; his records, he tells Gardner effusively, were one of the only sources of comfort to his beleaguered single mother as she was raising him in communist Poland. When, at the end of the serenade, Jan hears Gardner's wife sobbing inside her hotel room, he thinks their music has helped bring the couple back together after a row: '"We did it, Mr Gardner!' I whispered. 'We did it. We got her by the heart."' He is right, but not in the way he imagines./ppWith his mixture of overfamiliarity, ingenuity and banal patter ("it was abr /relief, let me tell you"), Jan is a typical Ishiguro narrator, recounting episodes from his life with a frankness that reveals more than he intends./ppAll the narrators in Nocturnes sound roughly similar and the collection is saved from monotony by Ishiguro's subtle shifts of register. The second story, "Come Rain or Come Shine", is largely farcical, involving a man impersonating a dog in an effort to cover up a mistake. The third story is more refl ective before the fourth , "Nocturne", reintroduces an element of absurdity. A talented saxophonist whose wife has left him is persuaded to have facial surgery to make him more marketable. He meets Lindy Gardner from the opening story (recently divorced from Tony) in the exclusive wing of the hotel where they have both been sent to recuperate. The story contains the collection's funniest moment, as the saxophonist finds himself embarrassed on a stage with one arm up a turkey./ppCertain motifs and images – of hotels and places of transition, of open windows – recur from story to story. So does "that croony nostalgia music", as one character describes the genre in which Tony Gardner specialises. The bittersweet memories that such music evokes make it suited to Ishiguro's style, but the air of stillness and regret, and the sense of missed opportunities, are tempered now and then by moments of farce or surrealism. Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way, but some have moments of great comedy, and they all require a level of attention that, typically, Ishiguro's writing rewards./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/kazuoishiguro"Kazuo Ishiguro/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RUvlCkyYU5LmEpSbzh3p4rXBG7A/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RUvlCkyYU5LmEpSbzh3p4rXBG7A/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RUvlCkyYU5LmEpSbzh3p4rXBG7A/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/RUvlCkyYU5LmEpSbzh3p4rXBG7A/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/64044?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+Behind+every+great+chef+%E2%80%A6ch=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=House+and+garden+%28Books+genre%29%2CChefs+%28Life+and+Style%29%2CLife+and+style%2CBooks%2CTelevision+%28Culture%29%2CCulture+sectionc5=Homes+and+Gardens%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CTelevision+Media%2CFood+and+Drinkc6=William+Skidelskyc7=2009_05_10c8=1213107c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=House+and+gardenc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FHouse+and+gardenh2=GU%2FBooks%2FHouse+and+gardenc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Arts+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FHouse+and+garden%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213107%7CBehind+every+great+chef+%E2%80%A6%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpThe television producer who brought us Keith Floyd and Rick Stein now spills the beans. William Skidelsky tucks in/ppThe TV chefs of the 70s and early 80s were, on the whole, a pretty uninspiring bunch. There was Fanny Cradock and her ridiculous monocled husband, Major Johnnie. There was the wokwielding Ken Hom and the pompous, patrician Derek Cooper. Madhur Jaffrey introduced the curry powder-reliant Brits to fresh coriander and fenugreek, while Marguerite Patten was occasionally wheeled on to bang on about rationing. And then there was Delia, presiding in her matronly fashion over this motley crew, dispensing reassuring advice about Victoria sponges and gravy./ppWho provides the link between these relics from TV's past and Gordon, Jamie and the other expletive-spouting celebrity chefs of today? According to David Pritchard, author of Shooting the Cook, it is Keith Floyd, the bibulous, bow tiewearing restaurateur from Bristol who made it big in the 80s with his run of shows featuring every possible variety of on-the-hoof cookery. Before Floyd came along, food programmes were safe, predictable and dull; their target market was mainly housewives./ppFloyd introduced an element of chaos, even danger, to proceedings, something which, Pritchard suggests, broadened the appeal of cooking shows, making them appeal for the fi rst time to men. "When Floyd came on to our screens," he writes, "he gave men a clear and open invitation to get into the kitchen and have a go for themselves. Forget about exact ingredients, pour yourself a glass of wine and relax."/ppPritchard is well-placed to understand Floyd's appeal, because he played a large part in creating it. A long-serving BBC producer based in Bristol and later Plymouth , Pritchard first encountered Floyd at his restaurant, Floyd's Bistro, in the early 80s. Although their first meeting wasn't propitious – Pritchard was told to "bugger off" when he revealed that he worked in television – he soon talked Floyd into making a series about fish./ppRegional TV in those days was a pretty ramshackle operation; Pritchardbr /had to work with a tiny budget and only one camera. The programmes, as a consequence, had a makeshift feel. With minimal planning or preparation, Floyd and Pritchard would simply turn up somewhere – a trawler boat, a country hotel – and film Floyd cooking, unscripted and with a glass of red wine at the ready, using whatever facilities were available. Although Pritchard's bosses doubted the formula could work, Floyd on Fish proved an instant success and the pair went on to film another seven series./ppIn Shooting the Cook, Pritchard tells the story of his years working with Floyd, as well as with his other big discovery, Rick Stein. As you'd expect, the book is packed with tales of larger-than-life antics and wacky experiences: the time, at a fish market in Newlyn, the stallholders stuck a label to the back of Floyd's Burberry trenchcoat saying "Fresh Prick"; the time Pritchard witnessed a 2,000-serving paella being cooked, aided by cranes, in Benidorm. On the whole, though, it's a rather sombre tale. What quickly becomes clear is that Pritchard and Floyd's relationship was always troubled, marked by envy and rancour on either side, as well as affection. Floyd, not surprisingly, had a colossal ego and resented being bossed about by Pritchard, whom he regarded as an ignoramus. Before moving to Bristol, Floyd had run a successful restaurant in France and he constantly reminded Pritchard just what a provincial upstart he was, with his liking for roast beef and bitter over cassoulet and Bordeaux. The pair's disagreements eventually caused them to fall out and they didn't see each other for 16 years. In the book's final chapter, there's a sad account of a recent reconciliation in Phuket, where Pritchard encounters Floyd, drunken and jobless, still harping on about how Pritchard and others like him got him into "this fucking mess"./ppThe irony is that Pritchard, though a late starter in gastronomic terms, and defi antly patriotic in his tastes, actually has a genuine love for food and the best passages in Shooting the Cook are when he communicates this. There are brilliant descriptions of coming of age in the 60s and 70s, subsisting on things like tripe and onions and tinned pilchard salad and encountering such exotic fare as Lurpak butter and spaghetti bolognese for the first time./ppIn fact, if the book has a problem, it is that it contains too much about Floyd and Stein and not enough about Pritchard. All the telly stuff comes across as a bit of a distraction from what Pritchard really wants to talk about, which is his own passion for food. In this sense, I suppose, Pritchard has remained true to his role as producer, deploying his talents behind the scenes while his "stars" take centre stage. A good and interesting book might have been an even better one had he allowed himself to hog the limelight a little more./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/houseandgarden"House and garden/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/chefs"Chefs/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/television"Television/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VKSj9A9bTQqQrRSQQsOCgHkURQA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VKSj9A9bTQqQrRSQQsOCgHkURQA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VKSj9A9bTQqQrRSQQsOCgHkURQA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/VKSj9A9bTQqQrRSQQsOCgHkURQA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/50838?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+The+masterpiece+that+killed+George+Orwellch=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=George+Orwell%2CBooks%2CFiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Robert+McCrumc7=2009_05_10c8=1213006c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=George+Orwellc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FGeorge+Orwellh2=GU%2FBooks%2FGeorge+Orwellc13=c10=Feature+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Features+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FGeorge+Orwell%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213006%7CThe+masterpiece+that+killed+George+Orwell%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpIn 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell's torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the book/pp"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." /ppSixty years after the publication of Orwell's masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that crystal first line sounds as natural and compelling as ever. But when you see the original manuscript, you find something else: not so much the ringing clarity, more the obsessive rewriting, in different inks, that betrays the extraordinary turmoil behind its composition./ppProbably the definitive novel of the 20th century, a story that remains eternally fresh and contemporary, and whose terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "newspeak" have become part of everyday currency, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 65 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, giving George Orwell a unique place in world literature. /pp"Orwellian" is now a universal shorthand for anything repressive or totalitarian, and the story of Winston Smith, an everyman for his times, continues to resonate for readers whose fears for the future are very different from those of an English writer in the mid-1940s./ppThe circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell's dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war. The idea for Nineteen Eighty-Four, alternatively, "The Last Man in Europe", had been incubating in Orwell's mind since the Spanish civil war. His novel, which owes something to Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian fiction We, probably began to acquire a definitive shape during 1943-44, around the time he and his wife, Eileen adopted their only son, Richard. Orwell himself claimed that he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944. Isaac Deutscher, an Observer colleague, reported that Orwell was "convinced that Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world" at Tehran./ppOrwell had worked for David Astor's Observer since 1942, first as a book reviewer and later as a correspondent. The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the 1940s. The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four./ppOrwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale". It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language./ppThere were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March 1945, while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation./ppSuddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In 1945, for instanc e, he wrote almost 110,000 words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer./ppNow Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response. /ppIn May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage"./ppIt was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. "Smothered under journalism," as he put it, he told one friend, "I have become more and more like a sucked orange." /ppIronically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm. After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. "Everyone keeps coming at me," he complained to Koestler, "wanting me to lecture, to write commissioned booklets, to join this and that, etc - you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again." /ppOn Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price. Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality." Then that famous Orwellian coda. "Good prose is like a window pane."/ppFrom the spring of 1947 to his death in 1950 Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity./ppAt first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. "I am struggling with this book," he wrote to his agent, "which I may finish by the end of the year - at any rate I shall have broken the back by then so long as I keep well and keep off journalistic work until the autumn."/ppBarnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. /ppOrwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins./ppThe locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own. The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was."/ppOnce his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book. At the end of May 1947 he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft. I have not got as far as I had hoped to do by this time because I really have been in most wretched health this year ever since about January (my chest as usual) and can't quite shake it off." /ppMindful of his publisher's impatience for the new novel, Orwell added: "Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job." Still, he pressed on, and at the end of July was predicting a completed "rough draft" by October. After that, he said, he would need another six months to polish up the text for publication. But then, disaster./ppPart of the pleasure of life on Jura was that he and his young son could enjoy the outdoor life together, go fishing, explore the island, and potter about in boats. In August, during a spell of lovely summer weather, Orwell, Avril, Richard and some friends, returning from a hike up the coast in a small motor boat, were nearly drowned in the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool. /ppRichard Blair remembers being "bloody cold" in the freezing water, and Orwell, whose constant coughing worried his friends, did his lungs no favours. Within two months he was seriously ill. Typically, his account to David Astor of this narrow escape was laconic, even nonchalant./ppThe long struggle with "The Last Man in Europe" continued. In late October 1947, oppressed with "wretched health", Orwell recognised that his novel was still "a most dreadful mess and about two-thirds of it will have to be retyped entirely". /ppHe was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with "inflammation of the lungs" and told Koestler that he was "very ill in bed". Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB./ppA few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US./ppRichard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works." /ppAs he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."/ppJust when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."/ppThis is one of Orwell's exceedingly rare references to the theme of his book. He believed, as many writers do, that it was bad luck to discuss work-in-progress. Later, to Anthony Powell, he described it as "a Utopia written in the form of a novel". The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. It was, he told his agent, "extremely long, even 125,000 words". With characteristic candour, he noted: "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB."/ppAnd he was still undecided about the title: "I am inclined to call it NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE," he wrote, "but I might just possibly think of something else in the next week or two." By the end of October Orwell believed he was done. Now he just needed a stenographer to help make sense of it all./ppIt was a desperate race against time. Orwell's health was deteriorating, the "unbelievably bad" manuscript needed retyping, and the December deadline was looming. Warburg promised to help, and so did Orwell's agent. At cross-purposes over possible typists, they somehow contrived to make a bad situation infinitely worse. Orwell, feeling beyond help, followed his ex-public schoolboy's instincts: he would go it alone./ppBy mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done. /ppNow Orwell, the old campaigner, protested to his agent that "it really wasn't worth all this fuss. It's merely that, as it tires me to sit upright for any length of time, I can't type very neatly and can't do many pages a day." Besides, he added, it was "wonderful" what mistakes a professional typist could make, and "in this book there is the difficulty that it contains a lot of neologisms"./ppThe typescript of George Orwell's latest novel reached London in mid December, as promised. Warburg recognised its qualities at once ("amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read") and so did his colleagues. An in-house memo noted "if we can't sell 15 to 20 thousand copies we ought to be shot"./ppBy now Orwell had left Jura and checked into a TB sanitorium high in the Cotswolds. "I ought to have done this two months ago," he told Astor, "but I wanted to get that bloody book finished." Once again Astor stepped in to monitor his friend's treatment but Orwell's specialist was privately pessimistic./ppAs word of Nineteen Eighty-Four began to circulate, Astor's journalistic instincts kicked in and he began to plan an Observer Profile, a significant accolade but an idea that Orwell contemplated "with a certain alarm". As spring came he was "having haemoptyses" (spitting blood) and "feeling ghastly most of the time" but was able to involve himself in the pre-publication rituals of the novel, registering "quite good notices" with satisfaction. He joked to Astor that it wouldn't surprise him "if you had to change that profile into an obituary"./ppNineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone. /ppThe news was broadcast on the BBC the next morning. Avril Blair and her nephew, still up on Jura, heard the report on the little battery radio in Barnhill. Richard Blair does not recall whether the day was bright or cold but remembers the shock of the news: his father was dead, aged 46./ppDavid Astor arranged for Orwell's burial in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He lies there now, as Eric Blair, between HH Asquith and a local family of Gypsies./ph2Why '1984'?/h2pOrwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in 1984. /ppIn his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title./ph2Freedom of speech: How '1984' has entrusted our culture/h2pThe effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on our cultural and linguistic landscape has not been limited to either the film adaptation starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, with its Nazi-esque rallies and chilling soundtrack, nor the earlier one with Michael Redgrave and Edmond O'Brien. /ppIt is likely, however, that many people watching the Big Brother series on television (in the UK, let alone in Angola, Oman or Sweden, or any of the other countries whose TV networks broadcast programmes in the same format) have no idea where the title comes from or that Big Brother himself, whose role in the reality show is mostly to keep the peace between scrapping, swearing contestants like a wise uncle, is not so benign in his original incarnation. /ppApart from pop-culture renditions of some of the novel's themes, aspects of its language have been leapt upon by libertarians to describe the curtailment of freedom in the real world by politicians and officials - alarmingly, nowhere and never more often than in contemporary Britain. /ppstrongOrwellian/strong/ppGeorge owes his own adjective to this book alone and his idea that wellbeing is crushed by restrictive, authoritarian and untruthful government./ppstrongBig Brother /strongstrong(is watching you)/strong/ppA term in common usage for a scarily omniscient ruler long before the worldwide smash-hit reality-TV show was even a twinkle in its producers' eyes. The irony of societal hounding of Big Brother contestants would not have been lost on George Orwell./ppstrongRoom 101/strong/ppSome hotels have refused to call a guest bedroom number 101 - rather like those tower blocks that don't have a 13th floor - thanks to the ingenious Orwellian concept of a room that contains whatever its occupant finds most impossible to endure. Like Big Brother, this has spawned a modern TV show: in this case, celebrities are invited to name the people or objects they hate most in the world. /ppstrongThought Police/strong/ppAn accusation often levelled at the current government by those who like it least is that they are trying to tell us what we can and cannot think is right and wrong. People who believe that there are correct ways to think find themselves named after Orwell's enforcement brigade./ppstrongThoughtcrime /strong/ppSee "Thought Police" above. The act or fact of transgressing enforced wisdom. /ppstrongNewspeak/strong/ppFor Orwell, freedom of expression was not just about freedom of thought but also linguistic freedom. This term, denoting the narrow and diminishing official vocabulary, has been used ever since to denote jargon currently in vogue with those in power./ppstrongDoublethink/strong/ppHypocrisy, but with a twist. Rather than choosing to disregard a contradiction in your opinion, if you are doublethinking, you are deliberately forgetting that the contradiction is there. This subtlety is mostly overlooked by people using the accusation of "doublethink" when trying to accuse an adversary of being hypocritical - but it is a very popular word with people who like a good debate along with their pints in the pub. strongOliver Marre/strong/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/georgeorwell"George Orwell/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/q9_81oOsLuLV2JEkZlCilZyfTTc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/q9_81oOsLuLV2JEkZlCilZyfTTc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/q9_81oOsLuLV2JEkZlCilZyfTTc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/q9_81oOsLuLV2JEkZlCilZyfTTc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/41263?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+The+original+Elizabeth+Taylorch=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=Biography+%28Books+genre%29%2CBooks%2CCulture+sectionc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Rachel+Cookec7=2009_05_10c8=1213037c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Biographyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FBiographyh2=GU%2FBooks%2FBiographyc13=c10=Review+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Books+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FBiography%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213037%7CThe+original+Elizabeth+Taylor%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpOne of the finest yet sadly neglected novelists of the 20th century is the subject of a welcome biography, says Rachel Cooke/ppAlthough she died in 1975, the majority of Elizabeth Taylor's 12 novels remain in print and are, thanks to Virago, regularly the recipients of efforts to stoke fresh interest in them; the most recent editions include prefaces by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. Yet still she languishes unhappily in the literary margins, hovering somewhere below her contemporaries Rosamond Lehman and Antonia White in both the critical and the popularity stakes. Why? Partly, her trouble has long been her name which, as the title of this biography hints, is too easily confused with that of a certain violet-eyed movie star. Poor Elizabeth. Once, in a smart London store where she was buying a hat, an assistant said to her: "I think you must have been first with that name." And then, in an effort to lift Taylor's obvious gloom at the thought: "Well, I think you have more character. Although I shouldn't say it of one of my customers, the other one is very empty-headed."/ppBut there are other factors. In their day, Taylor's books certainly sold, but they did so in spite of her attitude to publicity, which was mouse-like even by the standards of the 1950s. While she had literary friends, Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym included, Taylor was not one for interviews, parties or the kind of bohemianism that ensures one will not be forgotten. When Ivy Compton-Burnett invited Taylor, one of her biggest admirers, to lunch, Taylor wrote to her friend Robert Liddell: "I am bidden again to lunch with Ivy. Command performance. I cannot go." (She did, though; one could not say no to Ivy, who once instructed Elizabeth that, should one get up in the night to go to the bathroom, it was imperative to put on "both your stockings and your knickers"). /ppTaylor led a deliberately - you might say stubbornly - quiet life in rural Buckinghamshire, with her husband, a sweet manufacturer, and their two children, an existence that meant it was all too easy for her to be cast as a Home Counties writer of manners, one of those women who, as Stevie Smith put it, "sees life in terms of the daily domestic round, the children and the washing up and the clock ticking in the hall". /ppBut this was unfair. Her best novels - At Mrs Lippincote's (1945), A View of the Harbour (1947), A Game of Hide and Seek (1951) - are, in spite of their prim titles, funny, savage and full of loneliness and suppressed emotion. For her characters, as for their author, propriety is a survival mechanism, a way of keeping the show on the road. /ppNicola Beauman must, then, have come to Taylor's life hoping against hope there was more to it than met the eye, for all that she is a diehard fan of the novels. After all, Taylor had instructed that her letters be destroyed after her death; perhaps she had something to hide. As it turns out, she was right to hope. In her later years, her subject was certainly the very model of middle-class conformity, a rope of pearls always at her neck./ppBut her early life was strange and muddled to a degree that, reading about it, one's hunch about propriety hardens into belief: routine didn't only help her work, it helped her. There was something rebellious and disordered in Taylor, something that, though Beauman never states this explicitly, it is possible she rather feared. /ppShe was born Betty Coles in Reading in 1912, the daughter of an insurance inspector, and attended the Abbey School, Jane Austen's alma mater. However, her poor results in maths ensured that she did not win a place at university and she worked variously as a governess and a librarian before marrying "up"; her husband, John, whom she met in local amateur dramatics, was the son of the mayor of High Wycombe and, unlike her, had grown up in a big house, with staff. /ppIt was a surprising match, not least because Elizabeth, already determined to be a writer, had previously been attracted to a more free way of life. Eric Gill, the sculptor, lived with his menage nearby and, though Beauman is convinced that he did not seduce Taylor, it is certainly possible that she posed for him, nude. And perhaps this marriage was impulsive, the result both of grief - her mother had recently died - and girlish uncertainty, for soon afterwards she embarked on an affair with Ray Russell, an apprentice furniture designer and fellow communist (Taylor became a member in 1936, the year she married). /ppThe affair was to last, on and off, for more than a decade, surviving even the war, when Russell was a PoW, and only ended properly in the late 1940s, when John, although himself unfaithful, told her that it must. /ppBeauman has, triumphantly, turned up the 500 letters Russell received from Taylor over her lifetime and these lie at the heart of her biography, providing insights both into Taylor's writing life - it took years of rejection before the publication of her first novel in 1945 - and into her personality, which was not quite so sweet as we were led to believe. /ppThe letters she sent to Russell when he was a PoW make for astonishing reading. Taylor is so preoccupied with her own successes and failures as a novelist that she seems unable to write of anything else, least of all his plight. Reading them, it is impossible to escape the sense that she is using him, especially when she writes: "Nothing can be different in the future from how it was when you went away [before he went to fight, the couple had separated, though this was only temporary]. I can never give you anything but my friendship and the sort of love that is unacceptable to you." This writerly ego certainly puts her reputed shyness - her "little me" tendencies - into sharp relief./ppBeauman has written an elegant biography for an elegant writer, with the result that even the boring bits of Taylor's life - when she is being a good wife and mother and dinner is always on the table - whip along charmingly. She is especially good on Taylor's influences: Virginia Woolf, Compton-Burnett and EM Forster. /ppBut she also lets her love for Taylor get in the way, sticking up for her even when she is being needy and awful. Sometimes, her empathy is far too intrusive and syrupy for my liking. She is oddly delicate, too, writing that she could not bear to ask Russell, before his death, how it felt to lose Elizabeth (he seemed never to recover from her loss). Isn't this the job of the biographer? /ppWorst of all, she tells you how great a writer Taylor is far too often, using the word genius with too little care and acclaiming her, somewhat unconvincingly, as a great modernist. In this light, it's surprising to read that Taylor's children are "very angry and distressed" by her book, even though she waited until the death of the man who authorised it - John Taylor - to unveil it. They could not have hoped for a kinder, more generous account and it may well bring their mother new readers. I hope so./ppThe Other Elizabeth Taylor is published by Beauman's own company, Persephone Books, and is the first Persephone Life. A footnote here: Persephone, which publishes neglected novels by 20th-century (mostly women) writers, is 10 years old this year, and I for one wish it the happiest of birthdays. It is the most extraordinary, most lovely of publishers, as anyone who has ever bought, or been given, one of its beautiful dove grey books will testify. Its list, now 83 books strong, contains some duds (one of its most popular authors is Dorothy Whipple, who bores me to sobs), but mostly, it is a delight, including, as it does, work by Julia Strachey, Monica Dickens, Marghanita Laski, Richmal Crompton, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Noel Streatfield, Penelope Mortimer, and the great Molly Hughes. All to be read while eating violet creams, of course - or is that just a personal thing? /ppElizabeth Jane Howard once said of Elizabeth Taylor: "How deeply I envy any reader coming to her for the first time." Since this is how I feel about certain of Beauman's girls, I would hereby like my deep gratitude to her to be noted./ph2Elizabeth Taylor: a life/h2pstrong1912/strong Born Betty Coles on 3 July in Reading, Berkshire. Attends the Abbey School in Reading and secretarial college. Works as a governess and librarian./ppstrong1936/strong Marries businessman John Taylor, with whom she has two children. /ppstrong1945 /strongAfter years of rejection, her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's, is published. /ppstrong1957/strong Angel, adapted for the big screen by Franccedil;ois Ozon in 2007./ppstrong1971/strong Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, made into a film starring Joan Plowright in 2005. /ppstrong1975/strong Dies of cancer aged 63./ppstrongShe said /strong"People with no vices usually have annoying virtues."/ppstrongThey say/strong "Sophisticated, sensitive and brilliantly amusing, with a kind of stripped, piercing feminine wit." Rosamond Lehmann/ppstrongLisa Kjellss/strong/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/biography"Biography/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2clJVEWK96I5IJ5zW0amPvW-ZFg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2clJVEWK96I5IJ5zW0amPvW-ZFg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2clJVEWK96I5IJ5zW0amPvW-ZFg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2clJVEWK96I5IJ5zW0amPvW-ZFg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/21650?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+The+interview%3A+Jessica+Valentich=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=Books%2CCulture+section%2CWomen+and+women%27s+interests%2CLife+and+style%2CBlogging+%28Technology%29%2CTechnology%2CInternet%2CFeminism+%28World+news%29%2CWorld+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CWomen%2CCorporate+ITc6=Gaby+Woodc7=2009_05_10c8=1213001c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Womenc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FWomenh2=GU%2FBooks%2FWomenc13=c10=Interview+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Features+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FWomen%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213001%7CThe+interview%3A+Jessica+Valenti%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpThe author and 30-year-old feminist blogger has faced rape and death threats from a group of online misogynists. And then there were sneers about an infamous picture with Bill Clinton. Is that the price of fame when your website is read by half-a-million people?/ppIn September 2006, Jessica Valenti, a 27-year-old feminist blogger from Queens, New York, met former president Bill Clinton. He was hosting a lunch for liberal bloggers in his Harlem office. Valenti doesn't remember much of what Clinton actually said, but she remembers the occasion (her parents were so proud) and now, thanks to the internet, so can we. After lunch, a group photo was taken. Valenti, who happens to have long brown hair and a very nice figure, stood in front of Clinton, thereby acquiring a legacy she could not have imagined./pp"Who's the intern?" asked one blogger. Another attacked her directly: "It's obvious that you're bending over backwards - figuratively and literally - to keep the attention on your breasts." The mainstream media picked up the story; it was on MSNBC. To this day, if you do a google search on Valenti's name, a further search is automatically suggested: "jessica valenti breast", under which a number of items crop up. /ppA Wikipedia spoof called the Encyclopaedia Dramatica, which dubs the episode Boobgate, describes Valenti as follows: "Jessica Valenti is a self-confessed 'dirty whore' and founder and executive editor of a href="http://www.Feministing.com"Feministing.com/a, one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention and are intended for lefty men who crave some sexual content (but feel they must limit themselves to things that aren't sexist)."/ppWelcome to the blogosphere, Jessica Valenti's home from home. Valenti is indeed the founder and executive editor of a href="http://www.Feministing.com"Feministing.com/a (that much is true), a five-year-old blog that delivers news, comment and calls to arms. She is also the author of three books that fall somewhere between manifestos and self-help. Her site has half-a-million readers a month, most of whom are young women and many of whom are teenagers who read no other blogs. /ppOften, they come to it accidentally. Valenti likes to tell a story about a Jessica Simpson fan who stumbled across the site because it contained a post about Simpson's "creepy dad" and her vow of chastity; the fan became a regular reader. /ppValenti's view is that many more women would be feminists if only the word weren't widely thought to be a synonym for excessive body hair. "As a teenager," she says, "I knew I was pro-choice; I knew that the beauty myth bothered me; I knew that finding out about a friend of mine who got beat up by her boyfriend bothered me; but I didn't know that all those things meant one thing. So when it did finally come together for me, I thought: that's amazing. I think a lot of women do need that and with online stuff it's become easier to find. The internet has this really amazing subversive ability to draw people in and to spread that message in a way we didn't have the ability to do before. Now feminism comes to you."/ppBloggers don't just offer opinion, she suggests, they incite people to act, to affect legislation, to gather together locally. We know from the most recent presidential campaign what these new grassroots look like and the power they can wield. So what Valenti's full effect is, or will be, can't be measured simply by the response to her books or the posts on her website. The personal is not only political now - it's viral./ppI meet Valenti at her pretty brick house in Sunnyside, Queens, a planned community that was built in the 1920s and was once home to the architectural historian Lewis Mumford. On the wall is an Edwardian poster claiming to reveal the inside of a woman's brain: chocolates, love letters, clothes, babies and puppies are rendered next to two dapper-looking men. "I often wonder about that," says Valenti. "Women think about what? Chocolate, babies and... homosexuals?" On the dining-room table is a pile of invitations to the wedding she is planning for October, an event that has garnered a great deal of commentary since she wrote about it in the Guardian last month. She will be wearing an off-white wedding dress, keeping her surname and asking guests to donate money (in lieu of a gift) to a charity fighting for same-sex marriage rights. Her fianceacute;, Andrew, 25, calls himself a feminist too and is the deputy publisher of a political blog, a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com"talkingpointsmemo.com/a./pp"Want to see the dress?" Valenti asks, springing up in the face of superstition. On the back of a cupboard door in the spare bedroom is a beautiful, floor-length, white, appliqueacute;d, organza gown with a dove-grey silk lining. The neckline and the back are cut into a deep V shape. I mutter something about not wearing anything underneath it and she replies: "Luckily the girls are still in pretty good shape." I am slightly flummoxed - was there mention of bridesmaids? Only later does it occur to me that she must have been referring to her breasts./ppValenti grew up in a shop that sold bras and she certainly saw no reason to burn them. That was one of the many small businesses her parents owned. They also sold, in her words, "old lady velour jumpsuits and bedazzled sweatshirts"; they now have a health-food store. She and her younger sister, Vanessa, who also works at Feministing, are part of a large Italian-American family, who all lived on the same block in Long Island City./pp"Now it's, like, arty," she says, "but when I was growing up none of my friends would come visit me. It was considered a really shitty neighbourhood. There was a lot of prostitution and drug addicts running around. But I liked it!" /ppHer parents met when her mother was 12 and married when she was 17; they rarely leave each other's side. Valenti's mother took her on her first pro-choice march when she was 13. She describes her parents as "big hippies", who have a house in Woodstock and occasionally wear tie-dye. (Her father is a practising Buddhist. An Italian-American Buddhist? I ask sceptically. "I know," she replies. "It's pretty hilarious to watch him try to stay calm.")/ppAs a teenager, Valenti was such a Naomi Wolf fan that her parents sent her on a retreat in upstate New York that Wolf was hosting. It was a bit of a shock. There was one supposedly self-empowering exercise Wolf directed which involved making a list of 10 things you were most proud of, then giving a speech that incorporated them. Valenti cringes at the memory. "People are getting up and talking about feeding orphans in Africa. And I'm 17 - it's not like I have all this stuff that I've done! I'm pretty sure one of mine was, like, 'Am nice to my sister'. So I'm getting more and more nervous. She must have sensed my complete mortification because she picked on me and said I had to do it. So I start crying, and she says, 'You can't stay here unless you do this!'" Valenti laughs. "I stayed away from feminism for a couple of years after that."/ppDo Valenti and her readers and fellow bloggers constitute a fourth wave of feminism? It's hard to tell, since it's not particularly - or not explicitly - historically indebted. If you ask who she read in college that propelled her into feminism proper (she says that was the moment when the word "feminism" no longer freaked her out), she won't name any single writer or hero; perhaps Naomi Wolf put her off such habits for life. She simply says that she took an introduction to feminism class, which was taught by other undergraduates, and thought: "Oh, there's nothing wrong with me at all! I was right to be annoyed by this! As someone who grew up opinionated and kind of loud, and was always being told I wasn't ladylike enough, it was personally validating."/ppHer books hope to spread precisely this kind of word. Her first, Full Frontal Feminism, was written two years ago and aimed to show young women how feminism can be cool and can "make your life better". It contains subheadings such as "Sisterhood, My Ass" and "'At Risk', My Ass", and quite a bit of other information about what her ass has been up to. For instance, Valenti proclaims: "I'm better in bed than you are. And I have feminism to thank for it." She offers advice - "I'm well aware that going out and partying is fun. Shit, I have a hangover as I'm writing this" - and reminiscences: "I used to love to wear a T-shirt that read I DON'T FUCK REPUBLICANS", interspersed with statistics about equal pay and proportion of rapes that go unreported. The book is in its fourth printing./ppValenti published another book a year later: He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. She opened it by introducing herself as a girl who had a "slutty" reputation in high school and by explaining that this mystifying fact led her to embark on the cultural analysis we are about to read: "So fucking what if I had slept with every guy in my grade? Why would that make me a bad person?"/ppIn her new book, The Purity Myth, she recollects this once again ("Didn't the intricacies of my character count for anything?") and, after asserting that virginity doesn't exist because there is no universally accepted medical definition of it, she relays some possible delineations culled from her experience. "My college roommate Jen and I had a three pumps or more rule. Less than three pumps? You didn't have to count it as sex." They called these lucky guys "three pump chumps"./ppThe Purity Myth rails against a cultural phenomenon that has genuinely threatened young American women, at least since George W Bush became president. With the rise of federally funded abstinence education, the ever-imminent overturning of the right to have an abortion, and the general promotion of the virtues of virginity, Valenti wants to, as she puts it, "outline a new way for us to think about young women as moral actors, one that doesn't include their bodies". This is a laudable aim, though one that might appear to be at odds with the declaration that feminism makes you better in bed; certainly Valenti's oeuvre so far has not exactly made women's bodies seem irrelevant. After all, her books even contain views - and a repertoire of jokes - about pubic hair ("What do parsley and pubic hair have in common? You push them both to the side before you eat")./ppI ask Valenti if she think everything personal is political. "No," she says, "I mean, it's hard, right? One of the difficult things, especially about blogging, is that you put all of your personal out there, into the political. And what's been difficult, for me at least, is trying to keep some of the personal for myself. I often wonder, five years ago when I started the blog, if I could do it over again would I blog under my real name? I don't know - sometimes I wish I'd used a pseudonym. I've had people post my address and my phone number and tell people to go rape me. I've had death threats. It's kind of hard to explain, but there's group of online 'trolls' who call themselves Anonymous - they're basically anonymous, internet, misogynist troublemakers. /pp"There was one incident where I posted a video about online misogyny and saying that feminist bloggers blog under our own names all the time and say what we believe in, whereas when it comes to rapist and sexist and homophobic bloggers, they have massive anonymity to protect them. I said: if you really believe this, then have the guts to say who you are. They went nuts. They took the site down that night. I got 5,000 emails - you cunt, bitch, I'll kill you, I'll cut your breasts off... all kinds of sexually violent, scary things."/ppWhen she receives death threats she reports them to the FBI, and she's been impressed with how swiftly and seriously they act. As for the everyday stuff - apparently innocuous questions about her wedding, less innocuous questions about how many abortions she's had, challenges to defend her choice of dog from a feminist perspective (how could she have got him from a breeder and not from a shelter?) - she may have a new political campaign on her hands: a campaign to depoliticise. Take back the night? Those were the old days. When you're a feminist blogger, there's so much more you have to take back. "Like, I don't want it all to be political," Valenti insists. "I don't think about everything through a political lens. I don't!"/ph2Girls aloud: Blogger's progress/h2pstrongEarly life/strong Born 1 November 1978 in New York City to Italian-American parents. Masters degree in women's and gender studies from Rutgers University./ppstrongPersonal life /strongLives in Queens, NYC. Engaged to Andrew Golis, 25, deputy publisher of a political blog./ppstrongCareer/strong strong2004/strong Founds a href="http://www.Feministing.com"Feministing.com/a, a controversial feminist blog. /ppstrong2005/strong Helps set up the Real Hot 100 campaign in response to "hottie" charts in men's magazines. It celebrates the work of influential young women. /ppstrong2007 /strongPublishes her first book Full Frontal Feminism, bringing feminism to young women. /ppstrong2008 /strongHe's a Stud, She's a Slut tackles sexual politics. /ppstrong2009 /strongThe Purity Myth challenges the promotion of sexual abstinence. strongPaul Frankl/strong/pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/women"Women/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blogging"Blogging/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet"Internet/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feminism"Feminism/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fIM-e5OcBNiXAgMnkbtz2k40xYQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fIM-e5OcBNiXAgMnkbtz2k40xYQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fIM-e5OcBNiXAgMnkbtz2k40xYQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/fIM-e5OcBNiXAgMnkbtz2k40xYQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

div class="track"img alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/81548?ns=guardianpageName=Books%3A+%27Writing+has+warped+me%27ch=Booksc3=The+Observerc4=Fiction+%28Books+genre%29%2CPoetry+%28Books+genre%29%2CCulture+section%2CBooksc5=Not+commercially+usefulc6=Olivia+Laingc7=2009_05_10c8=1213041c9=Article+%28Content+type%29c10=GUc11=Booksc12=Fictionc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionh2=GU%2FBooks%2FFictionc13=c10=Interview+%28Tone%29c25=c26=Obs%3A+Books+%28nbs%29c27=editorialc42=Books%2FFiction%2F%2F%7CArticle+%28Content+type%29%7C1213041%7C%27Writing+has+warped+me%27%7C" width="1" height="1" //divpSuccess has come early to the intense poet-novelist Adam Foulds, thanks in part to a ferocious work ethic. He tells Olivia Laing what drives him/ppThough his dark gaze is unwavering and his conversation fizzes with ideas, Adam Foulds is tired. He's just back from a writers' retreat in Italy, his first proper break in more than half a decade. The past few years have been something of a whirlwind: from "poetry-smitten student" to prize-winning novelist and poet, accepting awards in a rented suit. /ppIn 2008 he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year awards for his first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, a darkly comedic romp about a Scottish no-hoper who develops an unlikely friendship with a 10-year-old boy. Earlier this year he was awarded the Costa poetry prize for The Broken Word, an intense, disquieting verse history of the Mau Mau uprising from the perspective of an English adolescent. (According to Matthew Parris, chair of the judges, the overall winner, Sebastian Barry, was "jolly nearly pipped to the post" by Foulds.) His latest novel, The Quickening Maze, is an equally dazzling historical reconstruction, telling the story of two poets, John Clare and Alfred Tennyson, who briefly crossed paths at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest./ppFor such a young writer (he is 34), it's an impressive body of work, not least because of its bold stylistic range. Foulds is not afraid to approach difficult subject matter, from the atrocities of civil war to madness in Victorian England. Nor is he limited by the confines of autobiography. Though critics have sometimes been bewildered by his scope, he remains beguiled by the possibilities that come from stepping outside the self. "I admire that kind of wide-ranging imagination that is able to immerse itself in different contexts and produce elegant, convincing, impassioned fictions. I find it a very exciting way of encountering the world, going from experience to experience and encountering them as deeply as I can."/ppHe was always "world-hungry", but the young Adam did not at first want to write. He grew up in Woodford Green, on the cusp of Epping Forest, where city and country collided. His mother was a qualitative market researcher and his father was a chartered accountant who later "trained as a rabbi instead of retiring". As a boy, his fascination was with nature (his years of bird-watching in the forest inform The Quickening Maze's bewitching sense of place). He planned to study zoology, and it was not until a teacher set him to write a poem as a teenager that he found his metier. /ppThat one "very bad" attempt ignited something in him: he wrote unstoppably, later honing his technical skills at Oxford through workshops with the poet Craig Raine. He did not turn to prose until he was well into the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia (he was in the same year as Clare Allen, author of Poppy Shakespeare, and short-story writer Clare Wigfall)./ppTo say Foulds takes writing seriously is an understatement. He is burningly intense about his chosen career, and one feels he has staked everything on it. As he puts it: "Writing has warped me. I have not fitted myself for anything else." In the beginning, he took jobs in warehouses, shops and offices, "menial work with very little responsibility that allowed me to keep all my mental space for writing". The three books were produced in a five-year period of continuous, dogged work, a feat that he feels "took its toll"./ppWhat drives him? The books, varied though they are, circle around ideas of freedom and entrapment, returning again and again to the problem of how to build a life within the often crushing limits of circumstance. Foulds frequently describes his work in violent terms. "These books wouldn't be arising if what I was struggling to articulate was not occluded in some way. The books exist because I'm wrestling with something, a way of processing my experience of the world and coming to understand it." Though his technical control creates surfaces of great elegance and cohesion, the power of his writing derives from the sense that, further down, a war for meaning is being waged./ppIn The Quickening Maze, poetry is likewise presented as dangerous. At the novel's centre stands John Clare, now one of our most highly regarded nature poets. Clare was a farm labourer who produced a vast body of work before slipping away into insanity. As one character memorably puts it: "England sang through him, its eternal, living nature." But "the violent machine of poetry" is as much curse as boon, and Clare's gift of the gab quickens until he is speaking in unintelligible tongues. His brief success has become a matter of bitterness: "You write your heart wide open... and in the end the crowd will tread on that heart as they rush to a new amusement."/ppFoulds's own experience of writing is not nearly so agonising. "It's not necessarily entirely healthy, but I actually find not writing a very difficult state." There are also compensations to the daily business of putting words to the world. "The way I write stylistically provides a lot of local excitements. Finding those accuracies that are equivalent to the experience is very compelling." It also makes his work intensely pleasurable to read, studded as it is with electrically acute images and phrases./ppThe novel he is working on now returns to the preoccupations of The Broken Word - war, violence, complicity - "but in a more amplified way". The phrase catches the difference between his poetry and prose: both are concerned with narrative, but poetry allows the story "to be as intensely delivered as possible", while prose permits ideas to be more thoroughly worked through. /ppHis own life, too, seems to be broadening out. After five years without holidays, writing in every spare scrap of time, he is beginning to find more sustainable working patterns. "You need to get out of the flat and experience things and encounter people." Endearingly, this includes voluntary work visiting old people, with whom I hope he engages in energetic conversations about England's poetic heritage./ppIt's not something one can imagine Martin Amis doing, and it's entirely in keeping with the sense of integrity that Foulds so powerfully radiates. Respecting one's elders is clearly important to him. He describes The Quickening Maze as "an act of filial piety. I wanted to get in contact with the deep sources in English literature and make a relationship with them for myself." It's a touchingly modest venture, but it also betrays confidence: a son's respect for a tradition he is well on the way to inheriting./pp• The Quickening Maze is published by Jonathan Cape, pound;12.99./pp• See Adam Foulds in conversation with the Guardian's Sarah Crown about his work, and hear him read from The Quickening Maze a href="http://www.tinyurl.com/cvp38g"here/a./pdiv class="related" style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/fiction"Fiction/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/poetry"Poetry/a/li/ul/divdiv class="terms"a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/feeds"More Feeds/a/divp style="clear:both" / pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2APxhyTyqiITeMpYsTfQ49m8VGs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2APxhyTyqiITeMpYsTfQ49m8VGs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2APxhyTyqiITeMpYsTfQ49m8VGs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2APxhyTyqiITeMpYsTfQ49m8VGs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p