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| Ex-MI5 agent in memoirs battle sues newspaper for naming him Lawyers for undercover agent in war on terrorism threaten Guardian with injunction though his name circulates onlineA former MI5 secret agent is suing the London Evening Standard for revealing his name, his lawyers say, in an attempt to extend Britain's privacy laws to cover the identity of intelligence officers.The agent is also threatening the Guardian with a high court injunction if the paper re-publishes his identity. The Guardian is therefore withholding details, for the time being, that might give clues to his identity.The man's name continues to be available online, where legal complaints have failed to silence foreign bloggers and websites which specialise in intelligence leaks. His lawyers say: "We do not agree that the information is in the public domain."The altercation highlights once again the difficulty of suppressing information in the online age. What makes the case doubly unusual is that the agent is simultaneously fighting his former employers in the name of free speech. He wants to be allowed to publish his memoirs under a pseudonym.His 300-page manuscript is provisionally entitled Siberia after the codeword he was given to use when in danger during a decade-long undercover career that began with other crime-fighting organisations and progressed to infiltrating international terrorists. The issue of his memoirs has already reached the new supreme court, where a hearing took place last month under the cryptic heading "A v B".His solicitor, Tamsin Allen, says he might be in personal danger if his name continues to leak.She claims that the British media break the law if they publish the name of any intelligence officer, saying: "Proceedings for breach of confidence are being issued against the Standard." The paper has deleted the article naming him, but copies are circulating on the internet. Coincidentally, the Standard was bought this year by a former Russian KGB officer, Alexander Lebedev.Under the so-called DA (Defence Advisory) system, Whitehall officials already have voluntary discussions with editors to protect serving and former intelligence officers from genuine security risks. This system could come under strain if it is replaced in future by lawsuits.The memoirs case reached the supreme court because MI5 wants the arguments heard in secrecy at the investigatory powers tribunal, with no right of appeal or normal rules of evidence, rather than at the high court. Judgment is awaited on which is the right jurisdiction. The tribunal was set up for a different reason, to hear complaints from people who believed they had been wrongly bugged or burgled.Allen wrote in June in the magazine Index on Censorship: "He was a senior and trusted MI5 official with a critical role in the history of anti-terror intelligence operations … when his career ended he wrote a thoughtful and considered autobiography. It was critical of MI5 and the way it treats its own field agents. But he applied his considerable experience to distinguish between real secrets and information which was already in the public domain or was harmless."While a junior member of another crime-fighting organisation, the former agent was decorated for feats of false identity. He is reported to have allowed himself to be beaten up to protect his cover. He also worked against armed robbery gangs.In the early 1990s he transferred to work for MI5. With the end of the cold war, the agency extended its role by targeting organised crime, arms traders and, eventually, jihadist terrorists. He was awarded the OBE and also an Order of Merit by an unidentified foreign government.He says he came to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and was mistakenly arrested at one point. This led to local publicity. The former agent later set up as a consultant, which led to his MI5 links becoming more widely-known and eventually published.The use of anonymity and secrecy is increasing in the legal system. The supreme court this month listed an appeal by Mohammed al Ghabra disputing that his assets should be frozen as an al-Qaida financier. He was described as "G" until anonymity was overturned by a media complaint.Oil traders Trafigura obtained an anonymous high court "super-injunction" over a Guardian report on dumped toxic waste. That too was overturned after parliamentary questions and internet disclosures. MI5 and MI6 are currently calling for evidence of collusion with torture to be concealed even from lawyers for Binyam Mohamed in his damages claim. It is the first time the government has demanded such secrecy in a civil case. In the Siberia affair, Jonathan Evans, the head of M15, refused permission for the book publication in August 2007, although the vetted memoirs of former MI5 head Stella Rimington came out in 2001 and an authorised history of MI5 by Christopher Andrew, commissioned in 2002 , was published this month. Critics say it does not tell the full story.Disclosures began 20 years ago with the collapse of legal efforts to suppress Spycatcher, the unauthorised memoirs of the retired MI5 assistant director, Peter Wright.MI5LawPublishingGlobal terrorismLondon Evening StandardThe GuardianNational newspapersNewspapersNewspapers & magazinesMedia lawDavid LeighRichard Norton-Taylorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The other Where the Wild Things Are | Tom Service The fuss over Spike Jonze's film forgets that there was an even more ambitious version of the children's book - an operaAll the fuss over Spike Jonze's film version of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are overlooks that there was a previous, and in a way, even more ambitious adaptation of the piece: the "fantasy opera" that Oliver Knussen composed on Wild Things nearly 30 years ago. Sendak himself wrote the libretto for Knussen, expanding the 338 words of his original book to a larger scale. Not that much bigger, though: the opera only plays for about 40 minutes, and avoids what Xan Brooks described in his review of the film as the "extrapolation and explanation; a cinematic York Notes" in the script, the narrative that Jonze and novelist David Eggers invent to make the story work on celluloid. The brilliant thing about the opera as opposed to the film – OK, I haven't seen it yet, but based the reviews so far! – is that Knussen's music on one hand opens Sendak's story out, imagining the sounds of the Wild Things' domain, Max's adventures, his heroism, his fear, his relationship with his mother; but on the other, the music never becomes a musical York Notes of the book. The instrumental music Knussen writes for the Wild Rumpus, for example, is defiantly adult in its construction, its sophistication, and expressive violence, but it's also so beguilingly orchestrated, so sensually scored, that it manages the Sendak-esque trick of appealing meaningfully to Maxes of all ages. The opera also looked great, in its Glyndebourne double-bill with Knussen's other Sendak opera, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and it's available on DVD. And here's a snippet of Max and Knussen's Wild Things on YouTube. Opera houses have missed a trick in not putting on productions to coincide with Jonze's movie, but who knows, maybe all this Wild Things-mania will mean some enterprising impresario will stage Knussen's opera again soon.OperaClassical musicMaurice SendakSpike JonzeTom Serviceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The publishing year Kate Figes asks publishers about the books they wish they'd bagged and those that should have done betterThe book: Direct Red: A Surgeon's Story, by Gabriel Weston (Cape, £16.99). Honest, literary memoir of hospital life. It's all here: blood, death, sex, mistakes and the brutal detachment of doctors. Yet the author's passion and humility shine through.Why it deserved better, by Dan Franklin, publishing director: "I was confident that this truly remarkable debut would be in the reckoning for prizes. Despite the sort of reviews most authors (and their editors) dream of, and excellent sales, it featured on only one list – the Guardian first book longlist. How could a dozen reviewers recognise its qualities and a dozen judges fail to? Normally I can shrug and move on. But in this case, it hurts."I wish I'd published: "Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. How wonderful to see a great novelist at last getting her due recognition."The book: Jerusalem, by Patrick Neate (Fig Tree, £16.99). Savage satire on British colonialism and the spurious notion of "Englishness". Inventive, original, uncomfortable reading.Why it deserved better, by Juliet Annan, publishing director: "It got reviews to die for, we ran a great campaign and we had a great jacket. But the book didn't sell as we hoped. Did we price it too high? There just isn't a connection any more between great reviews and sales."I wish I'd published: "Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl. Read it and you are transported to the middle of an Otto Dix painting. Finding Zweig was like reading Thomas Mann or Joseph Roth for the first time."The book: Cockroach, by Rawi Hage (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). Like the cockroaches inhabiting his flat, the narrator, an immigrant thief, lives from hand to mouth on the margins of existence in Canada. A bleak depiction, yet the tenderness of love always seems to triumph.Why it deserved better, by Simon Prosser, publishing director: "My greatest disappointment was this brilliant novel failing even to make the longlist of the Man Booker – despite having won or been shortlisted for major prizes elsewhere in the world."I wish I'd published: "Javier MarÃas's astonishing trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, which feels like the closest thing around to someone inventing a new way of writing fiction. At times reading him is like inhabiting a parallel universe."The book: American Rust, by Philipp Meyer (Simon & Schuster, £12.99). Two young men from an economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town find their fates sealed when they kill another roadster by accident. An astonishing debut.Why it deserved better, by Suzanne Baboneau, publishing director: "The reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were plentiful and astonishing, but prize attention and major sales eluded it. Few debut authors find themselves compared to Steinbeck, Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy."I wish I'd published: "Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. Maybe that is because I am an identical twin. I adored and applauded every word."The book: The Chapel at the Edge of the World, by Kirsten McKenzie (John Murray, £14.99). Impressive, passionate first novel about separated sweethearts based on a true story of Italian PoWs, taken to the windswept Orkney Islands in 1942 where they turned a Nissan hut into a chapel.Why it deserved better, by Roland Philipps, managing director: "Kirsten McKenzie has written such a good and original story, with a captivating voice. It was an in-house favourite, and all those who read it in proof liked it, but somehow it didn't get picked up for long reviews, except in two Scottish papers (which were raves)."I wish I'd published: "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson – compelling and brilliant."The book: Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne (Canongate, £10.99). Charming first novel set in the wilder shores of Dublin. Denny returns home after his mother has died. His episodic antics narrated in Irish dialect conjure up the heart of lost youth in an entertaining and endearing way.Why it deserved better, by Jamie Byng, publisher: "It's funny, original, pulsing with life and is wonderfully written but was pretty much ignored. We had great blurbs, a striking package and yet no one seemed to care. I remain convinced that Trevor is the real deal."I wish I'd published: "David Vann's Legend of a Suicide is a book that I read jaw dropped with admiration at its pained beauty and enormous power and bold narrative structure. Vann has crafted such an unexpected and heartbreaking work that I dearly wish we had published it. I must also salute Penguin who have done an excellent job in bringing this unforgettable book to a British audience."The book: A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East, by Patrick Tyler (Portobello, £12.99). Authoritative and engaging introduction to a catalogue of political miscalculation from Eisenhower and the Suez crisis to the war in Iraq.Why it deserved better, by Philip Gwyn Jones, publisher: "It is unblinking – not least in the Obama administration's professed aims in the area – and it is a cracking read. We brought Pat over from Washington and there was plenty of coverage but we sold just 1,300 hardback copies. I fear it suffered from a general book buyers' exhaustion with books on the Middle East. I had a vision that this would be – like Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem – the kind of book that would thrive at airports as a perfect introduction to its subject."I wish I'd published: "James Mather's Pashas – a blindingly good debut from a young barrister-historian about the history of the British Levant Company in the Ottoman Empire."The book: The Locust and the Bird, by Hanan Al-Shaykh (Bloomsbury, £14.99). A moving memoir of the author's mother who was forcibly married at 14 in Lebanon and then fled her husband and children for her lover.Why it deserved better, by Alexandra Pringle, editor in chief: "This is one of the most important books to come from the Arab world in recent years. I expected a deluge of press but it was overlooked on first publication and reviews appeared very late. I thought that the audience who loved Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Bookseller of Kabul would flock to this book but this hasn't happened yet."I wish I'd published: "The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook by Tarek Malouf. Tarek's shops sell the most delicious cakes and this would have made a fine addition to our cookery list."Couples – The Truth by Kate Figes will be published by Virago on 21 January.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Selected Poems, 1930-1989 by Samuel Beckett Adam Thorpe admires the struggle with language in Beckett's 'exquisite' poetrySeated in an empty French café with this book, I was halfway through the poem "être là sans mâchoires sans dents" ("to be there without jaws, without teeth"), when in shuffled a very old, near-toothless man in slippers, pushing his wheelchair. Having made it up to my corner, and polished off a honey gaufre and a glass of rosé, he produced a pocket mirror, with which he examined his eyes' bright red underlids. He then produced a clementine, peeling and eating it with ritualistic care, before emptying a tiny red-leather purse of its few centimes: all in silence.A literary revelation came upon me: Samuel Beckett did not invent, he observed. His is not an attenuated, surreal, abstracted world (the extreme end-gasp of that glorious era of high modernism), but utterly, piercingly real. It was telling that Ian McKellen, rehearsing this year's celebrated production of Waiting for Godot, discovered that Beckett's play, far from being "difficult", was actually rather straightforward – closer to music-hall patter than tortured existentialism.The danger, of course, is that Beckett will be made cuddlier, the vertiginous depth of his despair superseded by a shiny surface of comic misanthropy. Beckett's compass points firmly to the sunless north of King Lear, humanity no more than a "forked radish" in a world in which spots of love flicker on a vast bleakness of heath, and language is more dangerous than silence. Beckett articulates the void for us, in a way which no one in English letters has done since Shakespeare; and we need that articulation's purity, its catharsis.Beckett's achievement is so vast in his plays and novels that his poems have been reduced to something ancillary, of interest mainly to Beckett scholars, much as Joyce's poetry was. The curve of his verse career saw an early flowering, a long pause and then a remarkable and under-appreciated late bloom. As David Wheatley points out in his introduction to this new, rather glumly-designed Selected: "It was as a young poet that Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he would make his first breakthrough into French."His first published effort, "Whoroscope", was written overnight for a competition: a dramatic monologue spoken by Descartes, it is little more than a Roman candle of glittering cultural references, closer to Dada than "The Waste Land". Much later, he would put such nonsense-pastiche into the mouth of characters such as Lucky, whose great "tirade" in Godot has a much more resonant beauty in its madness. The Selected omits similar juvenilia and goes straight for Beckett's first and only collection of poems, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). A long poem in this, "Enueg I" (enueg  being a stylised complaint in Provençal, from which ennui derives), has the poet "sullenly" hurrying through the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod in long-limbed free verse. The Beckett lexicon is already here: "fungus", "skull", "verminous", "pestilence", and one of his best lines anywhere: "a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer", noted as he passes the Liffey.His lyric gift is evident, but so also is his repulsion at having to articulate at all: building a new language out of "babble" runs a fierce "gantelope [gauntlet] of sense and nonsense", as he puts it in the title poem. These earlier poems resplendently illustrate both his stated belief that verbal "putrefaction" will compost to "endless verbal germination", and his acceptance of "Art as the apotheosis of solitude": they barely communicate, but writhe in their own lament at man"s folly and suffering.Beckett is unusual for a writer in starting out enraged and disgusted, rather than being driven to it by critics, venal publishers, the mediocrity of public taste, or life itself on what Lucky – who is, among other things, a disappointed poet – calls "this bitch of an earth". It is as if Beckett early captured Gabriel's feeling of futility and self-loathing in Joyce's extraordinary story "The Dead", and made worrying at it his life's task. Unsurprisingly, the God-challenging Habbakuk is the one Old Testament prophet he gives voice to in the inscrutable poem "Dortmunder" ("me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners") – Donatello's toothless, howling sculpture of the same now looking thoroughly Beckettian.These poems need to be read three-dimensionally: that is, turned slowly until the variety of each poem's facets bring pleasure, if not always sense: "grave suave singing silk / stoop to the black firmament of areca / rain on the bamboos flowers of smoke alley of willows" – "areca" being a palm producing astringent nuts (excremental activity is a Beckett motif). There's no doubt that the poet, like John Ashbery in our own day, was responding to the scintillant elusiveness and collage-ism of modern French poetry, his free-ish translations of Apollinaire or Éluard bringing regret that he did not try his hand at more.A fearless troubadour of life's purgatory, for whom words are "stale" or reduced to "whey", the one poem to arise from Beckett's war experience as a Red Cross helper in shattered Normandy, "Saint-Lo", is just four lines long, and a masterpiece of concision. His later poems are either scarcely distinguishable from such short plays as Rockaby, or self-translated from French originals. The latter are often exceptionally beautiful, reaching an apogee in untitled, fragment-like miniatures known as the "mirlitonnades". These feel like x-rays of their own linguistic structures, a recent attempt to translate one of just seven words – "rêve / sans fin / ni trêve / à rien" ("dream / without cease / nor ever / peace") – spurring weeks of readers' attempts in the letters page of the Times Literary Supplement.On his deathbed, Beckett wrote "Comment dire", or "What is the word", a heroic, stammering attempt to accept that it is "folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint far away over there what –" : the two versions, French and English, seem to trap each other's misprisions and stumblings. He began and ended with poems, but, as Wheatley suggests, everything he wrote was poem-like, including Waiting for Godot, with its circular structures, pooling inaction and exquisite rhythms.Adam Thorpe's Hodd is published by Jonathan Cape.Poetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday Apple is expected to market its tablet computer not just as a way to read news and books, but also as a way for companies to charge for content. feeds.nytimes.com |