Reviews and News:
Time travel as social commentary: “Allusions to the present are in ample supply in this Russian doll of a novel. The story unfolds in a familiar near future of big data and artificial intelligence. Its characters have drifted through an extended adolescence: moving back in with parents and working in dead-end jobs, with friendships organised and experienced through smartphones. Now they drift through adulthood in self-driving cars, blithely accepting prying governments and big companies tracking their every movement and keystroke.”
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What it felt like for the French to get their country back.
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Ten fictional works about guilt: “The key element in all fiction is conflict, and guilt is a battlefield. Inherent to its intractable nature is the struggle to hide, to overcome, to expiate. The settings of these books range from hell to New Jersey, from Belfast to the Tigris. Survivor, collective, successor, sexual, Jewish, Catholic, post-colonial, existential, repressed, suppressed, sublimated: when it comes to guilt, there’s a variety for everyone.”
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Los Angeles city officials want to reduce traffic fatalities. So naturally they’ve hired an artist.
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Simon Winchester wonders: Why won’t people stay in one place for long? Why must they travel?
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James, Duke of Monmouth, was the best of the Stuart line. Too bad he never got a shot at the monarchy: “Born only months after the regicide of Charles I, he was the product of his father’s brief liaison with Lucy Walter, infamous for loose morals and for having reputedly planned to murder her maid by stabbing a large upholstery needle into her ear as she slept. A traumatic childhood was marked by his father’s repeated attempts to have him kidnapped. Charles eventually succeeded in having his son snatched from his mother’s care when Monmouth was seven, but not before the boy had been imprisoned in the Tower by the Cromwellian regime.”
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The secret life of Lord Byron is still a secret: “Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, who posited that it is primarily the reader who creates a poem’s meaning by navigating gaps in the text, Byron filled his work with tantalizing omissions to fire the imagination. One of his bestselling poems, The Giaour, a classically Byronic tale of a brooding hero avenging his murdered beloved, was subtitled ‘A Fragment’ to create an illusion that the full story lay elsewhere. The poem is riddled with asterisks that mark supposedly lost sections. ‘An outline is the best,’ Byron wrote in his final epic Don Juan, ‘– a lively reader’s fancy does the rest.'”
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Denis Boyles on the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “There are forty million words in the 11th Edition . . . and almost none of them are quotable. It’s readable in a functional kind of way. It’s a magnificent work of editing in that there is no pretense of art. There are really great writers in the 11th Edition but they’re harnessed to functionality. The purpose of the 11th Edition is to help you get the information you need. That’s where it ends and that’s as far as it wants to go. It’s not there to decorate the cavern of your mind or anything like that. [Laughs.] It’s just the facts. Just the goods.”
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Essay of the Day:
Caroline Potter on Englishness: “In 1936, a people already responsible for an indelible influence on the modern world could nevertheless prompt the Australian writer Jack Lindsay to ask, “Who are the English?” Lindsay urged the countrymen of his adopted homeland to reclaim their sense of identity by drawing strength from their “many voices”. The English have never been better portrayed or more audible than in Ferdinand Mount’s English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments 1985-2015 (Simon & Schuster, £25). The elusiveness of our character has often been worn with a certain lightness of touch. Such deftness is mirrored in this collection of essays — so much so that, in some cases, one feels that the biographies reviewed here have been rendered redundant.
“Mount, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, begins by telling us that biography and autobiography have always been a singularly English tradition. Memoirs can, however, frequently leave the reader cold. As Virginia Woolf noted, the quest for detail can so often lose sight of ‘what the person was like.’ Frequently able to condense a long and extraordinary life into a mere four pages, Mount admirably allays Woolf’s misgivings, while still leaving readers as satisfied as if they had just turned the final page of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.”
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Image of the Day: American Quartzite
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Poem: Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”
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