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| Alan Moore to write libretto for Gorillaz duo Fans of graphic novels and Gorillaz rejoice! The comics legend is writing the lyrics for Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's next operaFor the follow-up to Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's opera Monkey: Journey to the West, the duo have turned to a man best known for flawed superheroes, melancholy swamp things and a nymphomaniac Alice in Wonderland. Comics legend Alan Moore is to write the lyrics for the pair's next production, he has revealed."They came down to Northampton last week because we're planning for me to do the libretto on their next opera ," Moore recently told Mustard magazine. Though Moore offered no more details than that – and semi-erroneously referred to the pair as Gorillaz – Moore's news will still set Blur (and comics) fans salivating. Albarn and Hewlett's last show, Monkey: Journey to the West, was a hit in 2007 and led to a series of animated spots for the BBC's Beijing Olympics coverage.It's anybody's guess what Albarn and Hewlett have planned with Moore. The comics writer has penned all kinds of tales, from Victorian whodunits to dystopian science-fiction. His most famous works include Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.These days, Moore is primarily occupied with Dodgem Logic, a new bi-monthly journal. He aims to capture "the spirit of 1960s underground papers", using comics, essays, recipes and, er, lengthy examinations of anarchism. Oh – and also, Albarn and Hewlett."[For the third issue] we've hopefully got Gorillaz onboard," Moore said. "Being an opportunist, I asked them if they'd be prepared to contribute some pages to Dodgem Logic. Rather than just doing an interview, I thought it would be interesting to hand over a few pages for them to curate."Pop and rockGorillazAlan MooreComicsOperaSean Michaelsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Letters: Iraq inquiry weaknesses laid bare Your editorial on the Chilcot inquiry (23 November) is judicious and balanced, but surely your implicit criticism of Sir Lawrence Freedman (which others have expressed explicitly) is questionable.It is reliably reported that Tony Blair's speech on liberal interventionism in Chicago in 1999 was heavily dependent on a memo written by Professor Freedman. However, Blair's justification for the Iraq war was always based on weapons of mass destruction, and though humanitarian intervention was used by him to seek to bolster his position, the declared policy of the government remained that it would not justify war if WMD was resolved. Furthermore, it is far from clear that Iraq would have satisfied all or indeed any of the five criteria for intervention set out in Chicago.There appears to be no evidence that Freedman has ever expressed support for the Iraq invasion on humanitarian or any other grounds, and it might be fairer to trust that he would bring the same objectivity to the inquiry that he has displayed throughout a career as an eminent military historian and strategic thinker.Malcolm SavidgeAberdeen• Your leader raises the acute question as to whether two of the committee members ought to disqualify themselves. Sir Lawrence Freedman was not only a key policy adviser to Tony Blair in the run-up to the Iraq war but during the invasion wrote "the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East". And Sir Martin Gilbert expressed the view that Bush and Blair "may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill". It is a fundamental principle of inquisitorial fairness that no person should adjudicate if there is a real likelihood of bias. Lord Denning put it thus in a case in 1969: "Justice must be rooted in confidence and confidence is destroyed when right-minded people go away thinking 'the judge was biased'."Benedict BirnbergLondon• Two establishment historians (Sir Lawrence Freedman and Sir Martin Gilbert), a "former Whitehall mandarin" who spent years at the Northern Ireland office (Sir John Chilcot), a former ambassador to Russia (Sir Roderic Lyne), a former first civil service commissioner (Lady Prashar), and a career civil servant with 25 years' experience who is now director general of the foreign and defence policy secretariat at the Cabinet Office (Margaret Aldred). But no room for a judge, a lawyer or a known critic of the war. (Back to Baghdad: how – and why – did Britain go to war?, 24 November). Thankfully, Sir John Chilcot has given us an assurance that his committee "will not shy away ... from making criticisms of individuals or systems – where that is warranted". But then he would say that, wouldn't he?Martin SmithBristol• Does the Iraq inquiry really need great legal expertise to form a view on the legality of the war (Report, 24 November)? In international law there has always been an overwhelming presumption against going to war. States must be certain that war is necessary and unavoidable. If the inquiry finds itself uncertain whether war against Iraq met those tests in March 2003, then it can only conclude that the war was unlawful. On this point, it should bear in mind that Tony Blair has never argued that it would have been dangerous to delay the war to allow the UN weapons inspectors a few extra months to work in Iraq.In his detailed advice on 7 March 2003 the then attorney general expressed uncertainty over the legality of the war. Had he maintained and publicised that view, this country might have avoided participation in an unlawful war which has brought this country nothing but danger, debt, death and dishonour.Richard Heller London• At last Simon Jenkins has nailed the true purpose of the string of Iraq inquiries – the exculpation of all the MPs who voted to invade Iraq. The really necessary inquiry will never happen – how could our parliamentary system, its constituent politicians, policymakers, media pundits and the wider political community make such a catastrophically wrong decision?Despite the fog of distorted propaganda, skewed legal advice and dodgy intelligence, the two million London marchers, and presumably many other millions, were able to judge correctly, yet our paid representatives, other than Robin Cook, John Denham and a few others, couldn't.Andrew BroadbentLondon• Simon Jenkins has all the answers so sees no need for anyone to ask the questions. He acknowledges that Blair took the decision on war to parliament on 18 March 2003, before the invasion, but gives him no credit for doing so, even though he would have stepped down if he had lost the vote. Hansard shows that he did not say that Saddam had WMDs, only that he had ignored years of UN resolutions requiring inspection.It is clear that Blair was motivated by a grave concern about the danger of rogue states acquiring WMDs and believed, as did the majority of western governments, that Saddam had them or was seeking to obtain them. Many who agreed with him, including the Tory party, now keep their heads down. It is facile to label Blair as Bush's poodle; he believed that it was essential that the US did not act unilaterally and without at least trying to obtain UN backing. The question that should now be asked is what would have happened if Saddam had not been toppled? He would probably have used the belief that he had WMDs to destabilise the region.Anthony GarrettFalkland, FifeIraq war inquiryLawPolitics and IraqIraqTony BlairGeorge BushMartin Gilbertguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Bedside Guardian | Book review This year's roundup of reporting and comment from the GuardianUnlike Shami Chakrabarti – who describes in her foreword the Guardian's near-gospel status in her childhood home – I grew up in a household dominated by the Daily Mail, blithely unaware of what I was missing until a friend handed me a copy in the early days of university. I've been making up for lost time ever since. This newspaper has come to represent a particular way of thinking in modern Britain: unashamedly inhabiting the left, appealing to the empathetic and socially conscious, always to inquiring minds. The Bedside Guardian is, in the words of its 2009 editor, Hugh Muir, "an institution": an annual compendium that provides the reader with a diverse showcase of journalism taken from the paper throughout the year.And what a year it's been. From the election of President Obama, the real and moral bankruptcy of our global financial system, the onset of economic recession and growing discontent over the west's foreign policy mistakes, to the battle to defend civil liberties at home, the rapid disintegration of public trust in the face of the MPs' expenses scandal, Labour's domestic failures and Gordon Brown's undignified descent into farce – all the major narratives are represented here in fine written form.Larry Elliott's excellent analysis of the banking crisis in September 2008 heads up the collection. This was the year that the "rotten eggs" were exposed – but not punished. Seumas Milne is equally scathing about the biggest public bailout in history, and, at a time when politicians were racing to reduce the deficit by cutting public spending, he bravely identified that such cuts would only deepen recession.From the economy to Obama, whose election to the US presidency will go down as one of the defining moments in our lifetimes. A leading article reminds us of the "massively unrealistic expectations" and "daunting list of problems" facing the new president – seen all the more intensely in retrospect. Yet it also captures perfectly the mood of jubilation and the sense of relief that the world's major superpower had done something right. The outstanding Gary Younge brought us the view from the streets of Harlem, Detroit and Chicago – writing in awe at the incredible mobilising power of civil society and the hope of the many.In UK politics, we have Simon Hoggart shining a light on the macho posturing in the Commons. As the tabloids bayed for the blood of social services' staff in the wake of the Baby P case, the Guardian showed the extraordinary challenges that face social workers. And this book would have been incomplete without a contribution from everyone's favourite misanthrope, Charlie Brooker, writing with typically acerbic wit on Tatler's Little Black Book. We can also enjoy the peerless Hadley Freeman's five minutes with Justin Timberlake, and an acid exchange between Marina Hyde and Trudie Styler.Returning to more serious international topics, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad brings us face to face with the Taliban in Afghanistan, while Desmond Tutu makes a passionate appeal against the ongoing incarceration of Aung San Suu Kyi and the devastating oppression of the Burmese people by the military junta. But perhaps the most powerful piece is a searing monologue by the Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, published three days after he was assassinated in Colombo. A man of outstanding intelligence, courage and integrity, Wickrematunge accurately predicted that he would pay with his life for his outspoken stance on violent media suppression in his country and the acts of terror inflicted on its people.One shortcoming of this excellent anthology is the lack of an environmental focus. Despite the media prominence of the fight against climate change in 2009 and the lead-up to the Copenhagen negotiations, comment on the challenges we face is conspicuous by its absence – except for a single piece on Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheets. That aside, The Bedside Guardian offers a diverse selection of balanced and well-informed comment on the year's events; from classical music to swinging, it gives a quirky sense of what it means to live in 21st-century Britain. This is history in the making – and a great Christmas present.NewspapersBarack ObamaCaroline LucasHadley FreemanHugh Muirguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
2010: the books to look out for From cosmology to children's picture-books, our reviewers give a guide to the best of the publishers' lists for the first six months of the new yearJANUARYFictionThe first big novel of the year is Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence (Faber), both a tale of obsessional love and a stunning panorama of Istanbul society rich and poor, traditional and westernised, over the past three decades. It comes with a real museum attached: Pamuk plans a house of ephemera in which to display the memorabilia of his hero's affair and of Istanbul life, from ferry tickets to quince grinders.EL Doctorow creates another museum of the moment in Homer and Langley (Little, Brown), based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, eccentric hoarders who rarely left their New York townhouse and were eventually killed by their own clutter. Doctorow finds in their decaying mansion a weird and wonderful platform from which to view a century of American life.The trend for posthumous publication continues with John Wyndham's Plan for Chaos (Penguin). In this companion piece to Day of the Triffids, the suspicious deaths of a series of identical women reveal a plot to clone a master race. Meanwhile, Blacklands (Bantam) heralds a fresh new voice in crime: Belinda Bauer inhabits the mind of her 12-year-old hero, struggling to tease the whereabouts of his uncle's body from an imprisoned child-killer, with uncanny conviction.Justine Jordan Science historySeeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson (HarperPress). On a dismal night in London 350 years ago, a group of intellectuals sat down and created a society for the accumulation of knowledge. Since then, the Royal Society has been at the heart of scientific endeavour. Bryson's anniversary collection of articles by Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes and others tells the story of human advancement, from the pioneering expeditions of Captain Cook and dubious experimental medical procedures to Newton's theory of light, splitting the atom and the discovery of the DNA double helix.Ian SampleMemoirMust You Go, by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). This memoir of one of the great literary marriages of our time is based on diaries Fraser kept during her time with Harold Pinter. It promises to shed new light on the germination of his plays as well as on their lives together. "In essence," Fraser writes, "it is a love story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between."Claire ArmitsteadPoetryLove Poems, by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador). The inaugural collection of Carol Ann Duffy's laureateship explores a theme that has long lain at the core of her poetry; the publication of her 2005 narrative of a relationship, Rapture, saw her anointed as our generation's premier anatomist of love. This collection unites some of her greatest love poems with more recent efforts. "All poems are love poems," she said at last year's Hay festival. "Poetry can offer consolation, it can be angry and potent, but all these poems, these moments in language, come from love."Sarah CrownA Hospital Odyssey, by Gwyneth Lewis (Bloodaxe). In her first collection since stepping down as the first national poet of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis follows the odyssey of Maris, whose husband Hardy has been diagnosed with cancer (Lewis's own husband faced the same news some years earlier). Somewhere in the hospital she loses him, and her search metamorphoses into a descent through wards and corridors populated by a fantastical cast of fickle physicians, anthropomorphised diseases, party-going microbes – and the shade of Aneurin Bevan – posing fundamental questions about the nature of health and healthcare. SCMusicThe Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin (Harvill Secker). Eric Siblin spent years as a rock critic before suddenly falling under the spell of Bach's Cello Suites. It wasn't just the way the music sounded, but its backstory that so intrigued him. The Cello Suites had lain forgotten until Pablo Casals famously popularised them in the 20th century. In crisp, business-like prose Siblin explores the source of both his and Casals's fascination with some of Bach's most challenging music.Kathryn HughesEconomicsWhoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, by John Lanchester (Allen Lane). How did Royal Bank of Scotland get to be not just the biggest bank, but the biggest company in the world? How could so much smart money chase such stupid risks? With wit and fury novelist John Lanchester unpacks the dizzying complexities of the financial industry to provide what promises – from advance glimpses in Lanchester's journalism – to be the year's most lucid and illuminating guide to the credit crunch. JJChildren's fictionEnchanted Glass, by Diana Wynne Jones (HarperCollins). This shows how fleet of foot fantasy can be even with a huge cast and a complex plot. Magician Jocelyn Brandon dies at a great age, leaving everything to his grandson. Andrew inherits a house with unruly and difficult staff and magic suffusing it all. When orphaned Aidan arrives, seeking protection from extreme forces, Andrew has to get a grip on the magic – which means finding the set of instructions that seems to be missing. At the heart of all is the colourful, stained glass window in the kitchen . . . (9+)Julia EccleshareFebruaRYFictionA bleak book for a grim month: but Jon McGregor's Even the Dogs (Bloomsbury), in which a chorus of the drugged and dispossessed tell their stories, is unmissable. As the state begins its investigation into the body of an anonymous alcoholic, we get fragmentary glimpses of the lives the state looks away from: McGregor's prose is unflinching yet luminous. Joshua Ferris also examines physical degredation and mysterious compulsion in The Unnamed (Viking), in which a man's irresistible urge to walk makes him a stranger to his family and himself: the book is as hard to pin down as its hero, yet as readable as The Corrections.Memoir fuelled one of Martin Amis's best books, Experience, and his much-anticipated new novel, The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape), also promises an autobiographical flavour. In an Italian castle, during the hot summer of 1970, a biting comedy of manners unfurls as half a dozen young people – including a brilliant English literature student "clogged up with the English novel and high on lust", seeking to turn women's lib to his own ends – enact the brutal and confusing new rules of the sexual revolution.Andrea Levy follows up 2004's hugely successful Small Island with The Long Song (Headline Review), moving back from Windrush-era Britain to the last days of slavery in Jamaica; it's told in the voice of Miss July, born a slave on a sugar plantation at the beginning of the 19th century. Other historical revolutions feature in Peter Carey's playful riff on the life of Alexander de Tocqueville, Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber), in which a French aristocrat escapes Europe's guillotines for the New World.Elsewhere, discover the work of Nobel laureate JMG Le Clezio with the first English translation of the book considered his masterpiece, Desert (Atlantic), which spans the 20th century from the tribes of north Africa to refugees on the streets of Marseilles; while Paul Murray's outrageously enjoyable, bittersweet Skippy Dies (Hamish Hamilton) is an Irish boarding school comedy to savour. JJPhilosophyWhat Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Profile). In autumn 2007, the philosopher Jerry Fodor caused a stir with an article in the London Review of Books entitled "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings", which attacked the concept of "natural selection" in evolutionary theory. Philosophers and biologists subsequently wrote in to the LRB's letters pages expressing puzzlement: perhaps Fodor had overlooked this or that, or fastened too doggedly on a form of words that Darwin himself, after all, had called "shorthand"? Interested parties have not much longer to wait for a fuller argument.Steven PooleArtVan Gogh, by Tim Hilton (HarperPress). Van Gogh's life and work has tended to be overshadowed by his penchant for self-harm. So it's easy to forget that when he wasn't cutting off bits of himself he was painting like a fury, producing the paintings and drawings which changed the direction of modern art. Tim Hilton, who dedicated years to producing a definitive biography of John Ruskin, now focuses that same close attention on Van Gogh. The result is the fullest and most satisfactory life of the artist yet to be published. KHFeminismLiving Dolls, by Natasha Walter (Virago). This long-awaited book from the author of The New Feminism, who is also a leading campaigner on behalf of women refugees, promises to offer a rallying cry for the post-feminist era – an age when hard-won liberties are being sacrificed to a market-driven, sexualised vision of what women are today. CAFlightFly by Wire, by William Langewiesche (Penguin). When Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson river last January after the engines were taken out by geese, he was hailed as a hero pilot of the old school. Here, the reporter (and pilot) William Langewiesche promises a detailed account of the incident, tied in to a more general history of the increasing automation of aircraft. He argues that "fly-by-wire" systems helped Sullenberger, but that they also make him one of the last of a dying breed, sucking the glamour out of the piloting profession. SPPhilosophyMichelangelo's Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence, by Raymond Tallis (Atlantic). The philosopher, poet and former medical scientist was lauded for his previous books on the hand, the head and the mind. The latest bodily examination brings us to the forefinger and what Raymond Tallis sees as its defining role in humanity and human nature. From the touching fingertips of God and man in the Sistine Chapel, Tallis's meditation on the index finger explores how a seemingly insignificant ability influenced the evolution of our earliest ancestors and set us apart from other primates. ISPsychologyHow Many Friends Does One Person Need? by Robin Dunbar (Faber). Regardless of what Facebook has us believe, our poor little brains cannot cope with more than 150 friends. Such is the limit imposed by the size of our neocortex, says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist at Oxford University. But this is only one quirk of evolution that colours our everyday lives; our behaviour is bound by our evolutionary history in complex and far–reaching ways. Dunbar's latest delves into the experiments that explain why men talk and women gossip, why all babies are born premature and why monogamy is a drain on the brain. ISPoetryThe Wrecking Light, by Robin Robertson (Picador, £8.99). Robertson follows up his 2006 Forward prizewinning collection, Swithering, with a new volume which fishes back through Greek mythology with pacey retellings of stories from Ovid, and translations of Pablo Neruda and Eugenio Montale. His poems are haunted: by ghosts, by ambiguities, by the pull of the past, but at root, the collection offers a cogent, unflinching examination of the fallibility of the human world, set against nature's splendour and spaciousness. SCChildren's fictionFighting Ruben Wolfe, by Markus Zuzak (Definitions). Two brothers take to prize fighting after their father loses his job. Having practised together, one with the left-hand glove and one with the right, the two are both good, although Ruben is always just that little bit better. Cameron is always there to cheer his brother on, but what will happen when the two of them meet? Written with a spare, gritty authenticity, this is a compelling and refreshingly brief novel by the author of the bestselling The Book Thief. (11+) JEBlue Chameleon, by Emily Gravett (Macmillan). A lonely chameleon turns himself into all manner of things in an effort to find friends. But friendship takes more than just blending in. How the blue chameleon finds happiness is a glorious exploration of colours and shapes. (2+) JETimeRiders, by Alex Scarrow (Puffin). Operating across a century, three young adults are recruited by a secret agency to fulfil a single mission; becoming timeriders, they must fix broken history. The job can wait no longer as those in the present think nothing of changing the past. A thriller full of spectacular effects. (10+) JE MarchFictionIan McEwan's Solar (Jonathan Cape) grapples with climate change, as a burned-out, philandering physicist sees his chance to save the planet in a novel that promises comedy as well as crisis, while Rose Tremain follows her Orange prizewinner The Road Home with Trespass (Chatto & Windus), in which family resentments and cultures collide in an isolated corner of France. There's an eerie novella from Don DeLillo, Point Omega (Picador), which juxtaposes the metaphysical musings of a war adviser with the high-concept cinematography of video art, all considered under the unforgiving sky of the American desert.A debut from a former bond trader, This Bleeding City by Alex Preston (Faber), is the first of several novels this year to confront hubris, moneymaking and the emotional and philosophical ramifications of the crash. Look out too for Marilyn Chin's debut Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (Hamish Hamilton), a blend of magical realism and savvy modernity about growing up Chinese in America. JJEconomicsThe Big Short, by Michael Lewis (Allen Lane). Explanations of the financial crisis have not been thin on the ground so far, but The Big Short looks like a perfect storm of brilliant, informed writer (author of the classic Wall Street memoir, Liar's Poker) meeting big, important subject. If his recent articles in Vanity Fair – on the collapse of Iceland, and on the head of AIG – are anything to go by, it will be a gourmet blend of illumination and schadenfreude. SPCosmologyAre We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies (Allen Lane). Paul Davies is an imaginative scientist and a brilliant writer for whom the title question is not so easily answered. As chair of the highly speculative Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) post-detection taskgroup, Davies wonders if we've been looking for aliens in all the wrong places. Instead of pointing our antennae to the heavens and listening out for interstellar broadcasts, we should turn our sights elsewhere. Perhaps ET has buried messages in the DNA of animals around us? How else might an advanced civilisation leave us a note? ISReportageZeitoun, by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton). The Dave Eggers who brought you What Is the What – the life story of a Sudanese "lost boy" – is back with this account of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as experienced by a Syrian-born painter and decorator, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, and his American wife Kathy. "It's the stuff of great narrative non-fiction," said the New York Times. After spending six days paddling around the flooded city rescuing people, Zeitoun was arrested at gunpoint in what becomes a parable of human compassion and resilience in the face of official incompetence. CAAprilFictionPhilip Pullman subverts the founding narrative of the Christian church with a new take on the gospels, "part novel, part history, part fairytale", in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate). Helen Dunmore furnishes a sequel to her bestselling The Siege, The Betrayal (Fig Tree), which sees Leningrad in the early 1950s suffering under Stalin and recovering from war, while writer's writer Mick Jackson may have his breakthrough with The Widow's Tale (Faber), in which a newly bereaved woman holes up on the Norfolk coast to consider her past and her possible future. Roddy Doyle completes his trilogy of an IRA veteran in changing times with The Dead Republic (Jonathan Cape) and Naomi Alderman, whose Disobedience opened a window on the orthodox Jewish community in London, turns her eye on Oxford students in The Lessons (Viking).Nicola Barker's Darkmans was one of the glories of 2007: Burley Cross Postbox Theft (Fourth Estate), an epistolary comic novel that lays out the pettiness and passions of a Yorkshire village, is described as "a Cranford for today". JJLiteratureShakespeare, Sex and Love, by Stanley Wells (Oxford). The term "bowdlerize" is an eponym for the man who cut the rude bits out of Shakespeare to protect the morals of 19th-century women and children. Lately it has been more common to sex up the Bard, presumably on the assumption that country matters are all the youth of today understand. Stanley Wells can be relied upon to take a more nuanced approach, offering a historical account of attitudes to sex and love in Elizabethan times, and an analysis of those themes in Shakespeare's work. A central text is Romeo and Juliet, which Wells argues is at once the oeuvre's "bawdiest" and "most romantic" play. SPPoetryWhite Egrets, by Derek Walcott (Faber). Derek Walcott's latest collection contains few surprises: the poems revisit subjects – the oscillations of time, the place of the poet in the world, Walcott's home turf of the Caribbean – that will be instantly familiar to aficionados of his work. As ever, though, when it comes to the swoop and dive of his cadences, the Nobel laureate is in a class of his own. After the mud-slinging that attended the ill-fated 2009 race for the Oxford poetry professorship, Walcott makes a welcome return here to what he does best. SCBiographyKatherine the Queen, by Linda Porter (MacMillan). When it comes to Tudor biography, it might seem as if there is no ruff left unruffled. And while no-one can pretend that Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's widow, is a new subject, she has had less attention than some of the other wives. Genuinely clever, and with an all-too-human weakness for bad boys (step forward Thomas Seymour), she deserves to be seen as something more than a provincial dowdy who became queen in order to wipe the ailing king's enormous bottom. KHPhysicsThe Edge of Physics: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Cosmology, by Anil Ananthaswamy (Duckworth). The bottom of a defunct iron mine in Minnesota seems a strange place to search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that clusters around galaxies. But science takes people to unusual places. In Antarctica, a detector cut from a cubic kilometre of ice keeps watch for ghostly particles from outer space. Meanwhile, in the Atacama desert in Chile, astronomers search for stars in their death throes. The author mucks in with scientists performing the world's most extreme experiments, creating a travelogue that celebrates the blood, sweat and tears that drive our understanding of the universe. ISLiteratureContested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro (Faber). The author of the prizewinning 1599 embarks on another literary whodunit, investigating the cases of all the conspiracy theorists who have claimed Shakespeare's plays were not written by him at all. In doing so, he weighs up the claims and counterclaims advanced over centuries by a distinguished line-up of doubters including Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain and Orson Welles. CAMayFictionMay is a bumper month for fiction, with the long-awaited new novel from David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre). In 1799 the young Dutch clerk of the title finds himself one of the few westerners to visit Japan, a closed society that keeps its foreigners confined to a walled island. Jonathan Coe anatomises more recent times in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (Viking), a picaresque journey through the last decade, while Andrew O'Hagan's The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (Faber) relates the star's last days through the eyes of her pet.Alan Warner reintroduces us to the irrepressible cast of The Sopranos in The Stars in the Bright Sky (Jonathan Cape) as the girls, now in their 20s, launch themselves on a reunion holiday. Expect lipgloss, hysteria and razor-sharp dialogue. Meanwhile, there's more sedate In-Flight Entertainment (Jonathan Cape) in the new story collection from Helen Simpson, queen of domestic wryness, and an English release at last for Christos Tsiolkas's exuberant Commonwealth Writers' prize winner The Slap (Atlantic). At a suburban barbie, a man hits someone else's child; Tsiolkas examines the incident through eight different perspectives to build a rich mosaic of Australian society. JJWarWar, by Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate). From the author of The Perfect Storm comes an intense account of an almost fatal year with the 2nd Battalion of the American army as it fights its way through eastern Afghanistan. Accepted by the soldiers, Junger uses his documentary skills to ask his comrades tough questions about killing, dying, loyalty and friendship. The result is a book not just about war, or even one war in particular, but about the limits of courage and, yes, love under pressure. KHTechnologyThe Googlization of Everything, by Siva Vaidhyanathan (Profile). Google's corporate ethic, famously, is "Don't be evil", but does the company really live up to it? Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has been drafting this book online since September 2007, as the giant has stumbled into many controversies – acquiescence in Chinese censorship, book-digitisation settlements, and privacy worries about Streetview or its datamining of users' email and search histories. "One of my key concerns with Google is that it is a black box," Vaidhyanathan writes. Good that someone is trying to pry open the lid a fraction. SPPoetryDragon Talk, by Fleur Adcock (Bloodaxe). It's a shock to realise that this is Adcock's first new collection for a decade; the pin-sharp voice of poems such as "Against Coupling", "Advice to a Discarded Lover" and "For a Five Year Old" is so essential and recognisable that it's difficult to know how we've done without it for 10 years. Inspired by the letters her father wrote from England, where he was stationed, to his parents in New Zealand during the second world war, this collection returns Adcock to familiar territory: the family, and her own complex feelings towards her native country. SCPsychologyWhy We Lie: The Source of Our Disasters, by Dorothy Rowe (Fourth Estate). In her previous books Dorothy Rowe has managed to unpick most of the things that bother us in everyday life, from worrying about money to believing in a punitive God. Here she asks why we tell lies and puts the answer down to a mixture of vanity and terror. All pretty toxic, as far as personal relationships are concerned, but Rowe goes further: our failure to tell the truth is behind all manner of ills, from the current economic crisis to global warming. Scary stuff, but Rowe is so wise that you begin to think it might be possible to change. KHChildren's fictionThe Prince of Mist, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Orion). Murky things from the past haunt a young boy after his family moves to an inventor's house on the Atlantic coast. The motif of a six-pointed star appears in some unlikely places and Max becomes increasingly uneasy the more he hears the chilling stories of the legendary Prince of Mist. A powerful and atmospheric story of a mysterious character, whose sinister business is the granting of gifts in exchange for souls. (12+) JEJUNeFictionWe've been waiting a long time for the follow-up to Yann Martel's tiger fable Life of Pi, the bestselling Booker winner ever; Beatrice and Virgil (Canongate) continues the animal theme, exploring human cruelty through the characters of a monkey and a donkey. In 2008 Juan Gabriel Vasquez's The Informers established a vital new voice in Latin American literature. In The Secret History of Costaguana (Bloomsbury) he offers a riposte to Nostromo, as a Colombian newly arrived in London answers Conrad's advertisement for inspiration – then tells the story his way.There'll be a new Jackson Brodie from Kate Atkinson (Doubleday) and a theatrical extravaganza set in Dublin, London and New York from Joseph O'Connor (Ghost Light, Harvill Secker), while Caine prize winner Helon Habila addresses pressing themes of oil and kidnap in the Niger delta in The River (Hamish Hamilton). JJLiteratureEncounter, by Milan Kundera (Faber). A new collection of essays by Milan Kundera is always cause for celebration, and Encounter was loudly acclaimed on its publication (as Une rencontre) last year in France. This volume includes extended discussions of some figures who have previously had walk-on parts in his criticism, particularly Louis-Ferdinand Céline and the Italian novelist Curzio Malaparte. As with his novels, it is a mystery how much Kundera manages to pack in to an apparently simple style, and in previous volumes such as Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain he has shown himself a matchlessly perceptive and sympathetic critic of his fellow artists. SPIndustryThe Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention, by William Rosen (Cape). Steam is peculiar and really rather clever. You can't touch it and you can barely see it. Yet, when harnessed, it can move mountains or, failing that, pumps, pistons and giant rotating wheels. In this deft book, Rosen explains how this most whispy of commodities lies behind the world's transformation from one giant farm into a series of industrial clusters. As in his earlier book, Justinian's Flea, Rosen is skilled at hooking small, local phenomena into a narrative of global sweep and significance. KHJustine JordanClaire ArmitsteadIan SampleKathryn HughesJulia EccleshareSarah Crownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested read Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £201975: I meet Harold at my sister's. "Must You Go?" he asks, as I get up to leave. We talk until dawn. Harold: I am loopy about you. Me: I would make a very good secretary. Harold: The same thought had occurred to me. Harold sends me a poem. "My darling Antonia/ I just had to phone ya." I am thrillingly in love, though it is terribly awkward as I am heppily married to Hugh, and Harold is heppily married to Vivien except when he is having affairs. Luckily our children Orlando, Pericles, Immaculata and Stigmata just want me to be heppy.1976: Take Harold to meet my uncle, the writer Anthony Powell. Tony asks me if Harold is one of the Northumberland Pinters. I shake my head. "Oh," says Tony, before circling the table in a clockwise direction to pour himself Âanother glass of port. Harold sends me another poem. "My heart goes va-va-voom/When you walk in the room." His genius is irresistible. He and Hugh have a naked wrestling match in front of the fire while reciting Orlando Furioso, after which Hugh gives us his blessing to move in together. I am the heppiest woman alive.1977: Harold and I have a long chat about money. Frankly, we are down to our last two castles and we are flat broke. We open a bottle of champagne and go to dinner at the Connaught to cheer ourselves up. The phone rings. It is Melvyn, Larry, Ralph and Trevor all calling to say Harold is a genius. I have to agree with them. We get home and Harold recites Eliot. He does so brilliantly.1980: To Sissinghurst where Harold learns bridge, confirming my theory he has a naturally brilliant brain. We then join Tom Stoppard for a game of cricket. Harold scores a scintillating 1 before writing me another poem. "Your radiance divine/Is mine, all mine." If he wasn't such an outstanding playwright, they would have to make him poet laureate.1982: I continue to beaver away at my little histories while Harold creates his masterpieces in his Super-Study. He is in a furious temper because he can't make the second act of A Kind of Alaska work. He says he can't write any more. I glance at his notes. Me: You Âreally haven't lost it at all. Harold: That was my shopping list.1985: Harold is in New York to direct a production of No Man's Land. He rings to say he has a slight cold. I can't bear the thought of him alone in his hotel room. How I long to mop his fevered brow! Luckily he recovers and the Âreviews for the play are, of course, marvellous. He sends me another poem. "Such beauty, such grace/The smile on your face." I really do think it's the best thing he's ever written.1988: At some point in the last few years, it appears that Hugh and Vivien have both died. But I do not want to dwell on unheppy things. And Harold and I are both so very heppy. We have Daniel Ortega and Vaclav Havel to Âdinner and are heppy to hear both plan to stage The Homecoming once democracy is restored to their countries. Salman was also present. His fatwa is too, too awful, but he is such a handsome man.1995: Harold and I are the heppiest we have ever been now Dada has finally accepted our marriage. Harold has Âdecided to return to acting and is quite brilliant in Betrayal. Jeremy Irons and Claire Bloom say it is terribly unfair he should be the world's greatest actor as well as the world's greatest writer. I am the luckiest woman alive.2005: Every theatre in the world is Âperforming one of Harold's plays. It is no more than he deserves. Harold is Âincreasingly angry about the war in Iraq and he sends me another poem of transcendent beauty. "Without you at my feet/I am incomplete/Just like the widows in Baghdad/Whose husbands have been murdered/By that fucking war criminal Blair." So sweet!2008: Despite filling the house with the scent of freesias, I am very, very unheppy. Harold is dying. He writes me one last poem. "My heart is all yours/My death just a long pause."Digested read, digested: Hark the ÂHarold, angels sing.Harold PinterBiographyJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |