Archive for May, 2008
Nick Cohen in the Guardian on the UK’s pandering to despots:
Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry [...]
Acknowledging that writing is a solitary occupation, but publishing is a business based on celebrity, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky writes about the motivations of writers in The Kenyon Review:
Doris Lessing complained to the BBC this week that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature has been “a bloody disaster” to her career as a writer. She told Radio [...]
I’d finished swimming and was sitting in the sauna. There was another man in there, up on the top shelf, while I was on the bottom. Some guy with muscles looked through the glass door at us for a moment before coming in. He went up on the top shelf also.
‘I wanted to see who was in here before I came in,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you can tell if people are going to talk or not.’
‘Do you want to talk?’ the first man asked.
‘Yes, I don’t just want to sit here in silence.’
‘You can talk to me if you like.’
‘There should be a television in here, something to stop people being bored.’ Continue Reading »
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Here are some portraits of writers by the late Fay Godwin. The photographer’s archive, acquired by the British Library contains over 11,000 photographs and letters. The selection here includes this delightful study of Jean Rhys, as well as the young Salman Rushdie, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Tom Stoppard, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Saul [...]
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