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| Disney's A Christmas Carol | Film review Despite the title, this is Dickens's A Christmas Carol, faithfully rendered and extremely frightening, shot in 3D using the "performance capture" technique which transforms live actors into semi-animated figures. There are no inappropriate songs or additional sentimentality, and Jim Carrey plays Scrooge and the three Christmases in a variety of British accents. The production notes call him "a multi-faceted actor", which makes him just right for 3D.AnimationFamilyJim CarreyCharles DickensPhilip Frenchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Historic Paine deed falls out of 18th century novel Rediscovered legal document not only dissolved the marriage of Thomas Paine but gave him cash in hand to buy his ticket to AmericaA torn sheet of 18th century  paper which tumbled out of a novel by Tobias Smollett found in a cellar,  has proved to be the legal document  which not only dissolved the marriage of Thomas Paine, but gave him cash in hand to buy his ticket to America  - where he would become one of the most famous radical pamphleteers in the world, author of Common Sense  and a  leading figure in the American revolution and the founding of the United States.The document, missing for well over a century, will return this week to Lewes, the town where Paine worked as  a customs officer, and married his publican landlord's daughter,  Elizabeth Ollive.The document, referred to in standard biographies but not apparently actually seen since 1892, turned up again during the town's first Thomas Paine festival this summer.Paine's fortunes, always precarious, were at a particularly low ebb in 1774. He had been sacked from the excise service on a trumped up charge, the tobacco shop he had started with his late father in law had failed,  he had to sell most of the household goods to avoid a debtor's prison, and his marriage to the much younger Elizabeth was in tatters.The deed formally separated them, "whereas certain unhappy Quarrels and dissensions have arisen", and provided that Elizabeth should keep the money she inherited from her father, but hand over £45 she had in cash – in return stipulating that Paine "shall not nor wil at any time hereafter slander or defame his said wife".Paine spent the money on his ticket to the America, arriving in Philadelphia too seasick to stand on November 30 1774, and the rest was history.The document was hanging in the home of John Hughes, at Cowfold,  West Sussex. His brother took over as manager of a new jeweller's in Hastings in the late 1970s, where in clearing the cellar when he found a load of old books, and asked the owner of the building if he could have them.The document fell out of an early copy of an 18th century novel by Smollett, and they thought  it interesting and attractive enough to frame. It was only when the festival revived local interest in Paine that they realised its significance.It has been bought for almost £13,500 at  a Bloomsbury auction by the East Sussex records office and  Lewes town council using external grants. Donors include  Paul Myles, who organised the  festival, and  who now wonders if the book, holding one third of the original document which would have been kept as proof  by one of the parties to the agreement, could have belonged to Elizabeth.Appropriately, given the importance of drink and taverns in Paine's time in the town, the local Harvey's brewery also contributed.Maev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
John Singer Sargent’s Model Children This “life” of John Singer Sargent’s stirring painting “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” wields a novel’s power. feeds.nytimes.com |
Lucy Mangan: So long, 2009, you were, overall, a pretty good year 'If you had told me in 1980 that this day would ever come, I would not have credited it'Well, hello again! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year, and got all the train sets and tangerines, quality time and Quality Street* that your hearts desired.And now it is 2010, can you believe it? If you had told me in 1980 that this day would ever come, I would not have credited it. Mainly because I would have been in the throes of a profound panic about our imminent annihilation by nuclear war and clinging desperately to my mother's leg while I sobbingly tried to convince her not to go to work in case the four-minute warning sounded while she was gone.If only, if only someone had been able to tap me on the shoulder and assure me that humanity's would be a much slower, long-drawn-out death preceded by years of suffering as the hot hand of global warming reached down to crush us all! What childhood ebullience could have been restored...Anyway, it is best not to look too far back. A brief stocktake of the previous year should suffice as a restorative, as we remember the achievements and successes, and a potential prophylactic against repetition of the mistakes made in the twelvemonth gone.It has, overall, been a remarkably good year for me:1. I found my dressing gown cord.2. I met John Tams and Jonathan Miller – the latter after he gave a lecture on humour as part of a series held by the Association Of Lovely People Who Go To Lovely Lectures Organised By Splendid People Who Organise Lovely Lectures For Lovely People Who Are Interested In That Sort Of Thing And Who All Have A Lovely Glass Of White Wine Afterwards. We had a conversation. Miller expanded on the theories of comedy he had just outlined, with a digression into the differences between masculine and feminine jokes and the usage thereof, and I said, "Nynggh, mmpff, thrfff." I hope I gave him something to think about.3. I successfully thickened gravy. Twice.4. I got married… no, wait, that was the year before. This year I stayed married – a far greater achievement.5. I survived a fairly serious bout of reader's block, and let me take this opportunity to thank you all for your very kind suggestions on how best to treat it. I now have a special shelf of all sorts of books that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, and look forward to sampling them in the new year. But in the end the book that finally unblocked my clogged mind-arteries came from the most unlikely of sources, a woman who to my certain knowledge has read only four books in her life – Jane Eyre (for GCSE), two car manuals and the one that she passed on to me in my hour of need, Ella Minnow Pea. It made my brain fizz, it re-juiced all my reading glands and altogether made the world once again a worthwhile place to be, even though part of me is still reeling from the knowledge that I am now in biblio-debt to my sister. That is a fact it is going to take me most of 2010 to absorb.Next year I am going to be 10% thinner (or taller), 15% fitter, 13% kinder, 12% more tolerant and 50% tidier. This will make me a 100% better person, and about time, too. Happy New Year!*The Mangans have traditionally been a Roses family, but we are switching allegiance after the discovery on Christmas morning that the coffee cream has, with neither due warning nor consideration, been discontinued. Cadbury is now dead to us. Kraft, Hershey – take it and welcome.New YearLucy Manganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Is it really doomsday for books? Economic and technological changes have freed the English language from the shackles of empire and expanded its reach still widerFrom the embattled frontline of the Anglo-American books world there seems to be nothing but bad news. Publishers have become like unlucky generals, receiving "All is lost. Flee at once" reports from panic-stricken aides-de-camp. Only a very few can say, with Macbeth, that they will never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.Borders has fallen. Waterstone's, once a mighty citadel, is beseiged. MD Gerry Johnson has quit. Well-known literary agents are scurrying round town in search of life-saving mergers. Advances have hit rock bottom. The celebrity memoir is going the way of the dodo. The ebook is the future. Libraries, comprehensively digitised by Google, have become mausoleums of an ossifying tradition.On and on it goes. 2010, not three weeks old, bears all the signs of a watershed year. It used to be the conventional wisdom that books tended to be recession-proof. Not this time. A perfect storm of economic and technological change has transformed the literary atmosphere more completely than at any time in living memory. Across the blogosphere you hear the same refrain: "The sky is falling."We should not surrender too easily to the seductions of pessimism. Publishers, notoriously, are like farmers: the harvest was disastrous, the crops are failing; the herd is sick and they've never known weather like it. Yet there they are, living the life of Riley, carving up the countryside in shiny new Chelsea tractors and trousering hefty EC grants…In books, from some points of view, there is still plenty to celebrate. Readers are more dynamic and discriminating than they have been for a generation. Literary festivals are booming. The books themselves, with some egregious exceptions, are better printed, bound and jacketed than ever before. Take any volume published in the 1970s and place it next to, say, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall or Colm TóibÃn's Brooklyn. The contrast is shocking. Narrow margins, cheap paper, and hideous typography have all had a comprehensive aesthetic makeover.The broader the horizons, the better it looks. The global marketplace into which these books are launched has become exceedingly hospitable to writers, booksellers and literary middlemen who make their living from the English language. Here, particularly, there has been a transformation whose economic and cultural consequences are only just beginning to attract serious attention.This transformation has been shrouded in something like the fog of war, the smoke and dust from the global IT revolution whose outcome no sensible person can predict, and whose influence touches every aspect of the printed word: books, magazines and newspapers.The essentials are clear enough: English, in its contemporary Anglo-American guise, has been a lingua franca since roughly the end of the second world war. Throughout the cold war, Anglo-American culture and values became as much a part of global consciousness as the combustion engine. There was hardly a transaction in the contemporary world that was innocent of English, in some form. However, until the turn of the millennium, its scope was limited by its troubled association with British imperialism and the pax Americana.But now, for the first time, English language and culture are rapidly becoming decoupled from their contentious past and disassociated from postcolonial trauma. At the same time, thanks to Microsoft, Vodafone, Orange and Apple, this rejuvenated lingua franca has acquired the capacity to zoom through space and time at unprecedented speeds, reaching unprecedented new audiences. An evolving technology is changing the rules of the game faster than the match itself can be played.At the Observer, and on our sister paper the Guardian, the sense of a rapidly Âevolving kind of readership has recently been codified into 10 propositions, Âbeginning with "There is no such thing as Abroad", and concluding "Most of our readers are 'foreign'". The same strange-but-true reality touches every aspect of the book world, from the Orange prize to the pirating of Harry Potter in Beijing.The emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon with a supra-national momentum that gives it an independence from its Anglo-American roots is at once thrilling and decisive. An eloquent riposte to the dismal tidings from the traditional world of ink and paper, it is making a potent new force in the world of books, and probably provides the long-term solution to its current woes. Time to revive those blocked war memoirsAs the Chilcot inquiry begins to expose more and more forgotten skeletons from the shameful past, I wonder where Sir Jeremy Greenstock's memoirs, The Costs of War, have got to. Once our man at the UN, and the UK's highest official in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, Sir Jeremy completed his insider's account of the run-up to hostilities as long ago as 2005, having made a contract with Public Affairs, USA, a division of Perseus Books, which described it at the time as "remarkably candid". Too candid, certainly, for Jack Straw's Foreign Office which effectively scotched the book. Sir Jeremy, who now runs the Ditchley Foundation, took the manuscript back, vowing to make the text more acceptable to the censor. Since when: silence. Perhaps in the spirit of full disclosure, and regime change at the FO, he can be persuaded to lift the text from his bottom drawer.Dauntless Daniel enters the lions' denThe glossy intellectual magazine Standpoint is barely two years old, but its pioneering first editor, Daniel Johnson, precociously finding his feet, seems to know neither fear nor fashion. His new year issue contains a snappy column about the London Review of Books that questions its Arts Council grant as a "no-strings subsidy from the taxpayer" and then, taking no prisoners, denounces its distinguished proprietor-editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers (above), for publishing antisemitic propaganda. "The editor who takes credit for the LRB's success," concludes Mr Johnson, nailing his colours to Standpoint's mast, "must also take responsibility for its bigotry." In Fleet Street, it was always said that dog did not eat dog. Plainly, a different code applies to the back alleys of new Grub Street. I await Ms Wilmers' inevitable response with interest.Hilary MantelRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |