John Baker’s Blog

A nice piece on Arthur Rimbaud from Ellis Sharp. These are extracts, but the whole article is worth your attention.
Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his [...]

 
Terror of Flight 101: An echo of Orwell.
The flight leaves Heathrow airport’s Terminal Four, every Wednesday bearing the number KQ101. The echo of George Orwell’s Room 101 is unhappily appropriate. On this Kenya Airways jet, many asylum-seekers’ worst nightmares do come true. KQ101 is the deportation flight chartered by the British Government to return refugees [...]

On her blog, Writing, Life and the Universe, Angela Young tells us about a seminar she attended in the UK with Mark Thornton, where the subject matter, for authors, is how to sell your book to the independent bookshops. Mark’s course, entitled, Shelf Secrets, runs over a single day and is presented at Mostly [...]

Thirteen reasons why you should read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
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Neocons on a cruise. Johann Hari, in The Independent, sets sail with America’s swashbuckling neocons:
From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on [...]