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| Sheila Unwin obituary At the age of 86 Sheila Unwin fulfilled her lifelong ambition and wrote a book called The Arab Chest My mother, Sheila Unwin, who has died aged 89, was an expert in Swahili and Arab culture. At the age of 86 she fulfilled her lifelong ambition and published The Arab Chest, a personal yet academic account of her quest into the origins of these brass-studded wooden pieces of furniture found all over the Gulf and East Africa.This fascination began as long ago as the late 1940s when, after the second world war, she and my father went to Tanganyika to work on the ill-fated Groundnut Scheme, the British government plan for the large-scale cultivation of peanuts. There they lived in a tent for the first two years of their married life.During the revolution in Zanzibar in 1964, Sheila rescued an Arab family and, in return, was given first option on a shipment of 60 chests, for which she paid the sum of £600, borrowed from a trusting bank manager. From that moment on, she had to know their provenance and she became a latter-day Freya Stark, travelling alone in the 1960s and 70s through Ethiopia, Yemen, the Gulf States, Pakistan, Iran, India and Turkey; in the 1980s she joined successive expeditions to Baluchistan as a cultural adviser.She was born Sheila Mills in Scotland and grew up in Norfolk; her father, Findlay, whom she revered, was a first world war hero and won a DSO. After leaving school, where she had excelled academically, she went to St James's secretarial college in London, where she was very proud of achieving 150wpm shorthand. Her greatest regret was that the war prevented her from going to university.She was a second officer in the WRNS during the war, most of which she spent in Egypt. In 1945 she was posted to Germany, where she met my father, Tom. They married the following year.After their divorce in 1970, she returned to East Africa and, hard up, undertook a soul-destroying job with the United Nations as a stenographer; but in her leisure time she went on archaeological digs with Neville Chittick, her soulmate, whom she had first met in the 1950s; she participated in historic digs in the Manda, Pate and Lamu islands, off the coast of Kenya, where she and Neville bought a house. She also started collecting tribal handicrafts, many examples of which are now in the Exeter Museum.She returned to Britain in the 1970s. She was a warm and popular person, with a vast array of friends from all over the world, many of whom turned up for her book launch, where she sat resplendent and elegant in a gold jellaba, at the zenith of her remarkable life.I survive her, along with her two grandchildren, Tommy and Louise, her sister, Rosemary, and Tom, with whom she remained on good terms.HistoryEthiopiaYemenPakistanIranIndiaTurkeyArchaeologyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Cause of Jane Austen's death not universally acknowledged • New theory points to TB caught from cows• Author's demise at 41 has fascinated expertsIn her beguiling comic plots, Jane Austen often ridicules characters who fuss excessively about the state of their health.The 19th-century novelist would therefore be perplexed – and perhaps amused – to discover that nearly 200 years after her death, the precise nature of her mysterious final illness has become a subject of enduring literary fascination.Fresh, retrospective analysis of her symptoms, published today, suggests that the author of Pride and Prejudice may have died prematurely of tuberculosis caught from cattle.Examination of Austen's correspondence and the recollections of her family prove, it is claimed, that she was not, as previous medical experts hypothesised, a victim of Addison's disease, a once-fatal hormone-disrupting condition.With her book sales still buoyant and her fiction repackaged as popular television mini-series, Austen's very private life still intrigues her modern readership, while physicians and biographers have been in dispute for the last 40 years about the precise cause of her death in 1817.Writing in the British Medical Journal's Medical Humanities magazine, Katherine White, of the Addison's disease self-help group, presents evidence aimed at exploding one of the more widely accepted medical theories of her demise."Jane Austen died at the age of 41, leaving her seventh novel, Sanditon, unfinished," White says. "While she outlasted many of her peers in Regency England – she saw four of her sisters-in-law buried from childbirth complications – the cause of her death … remains tantalisingly open to posthumous speculation."In her youth and throughout most of her adult life, Austen enjoyed a relatively robust constitution. While still a young teenager, she wrote her first satirical, comic novel, Love and Friendship, in which the protagonists are repeatedly mocked for their indulgent, emotional fainting fits.Her mature works, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma were all published anonymously – signed "By a Lady" – and appeared from 1811 onwards.Austen's last two works, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were released posthumously and were the first to identify her as the true author.Austen travelled in May 1817 to Winchester to seek medical help but died in the Hampshire city two months later. As one of the many literary websites dedicated to her life and works records: "Jane Austen died in the dawn of Friday 18 July 1817, her head cradled on a pillow on Cassandra's lap; her sister had kept a vigil by her bedside for most of the night."Cassandra wrote afterwards: 'She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow. I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.'"Jane Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral.White writes: "In 1964, [the surgeon Sir] Zachary Cope proposed that tubercular Addison's disease could explain her two-year deterioration into bed-ridden exhaustion, her unusual colouring, bilious attacks, rheumatic pains and the absence of more specific indicators of disease."By contrast, one of Austen's most recent biographers, Claire Tomalin, suggested in 1997 that lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system) would be a better fit for the novelist's reported symptoms.Examining her symptoms, as described in the novelist's letters, White agrees that Cope's diagnosis of Addison's disease could be correct, but notes: "Most patients with the disease experience mental confusion, generalised pain, weight loss and loss of appetite. None of these symptoms appears in Miss Austen's letters."Less than two months before her death, Austen wrote: "My head was always clear, and I had scarcely any pain."She even dictated 24 lines of comic verse from her sickbed to her sister in her last days.Contemporary reports of Austen's skin discolouration, White adds, may have referred to the dark circles under her eyes. "Therefore, we can conclude that it is most likely she did not die from Addison's," she writes."While lymphoma would be one possible cause of the exhaustion, recurrent fever, bilious attacks and rheumatic pains described by Austen ,disseminated tuberculosis affecting the joints and liver – probably of bovine origin – would offer a simpler explanation for her symptoms."As to that troublesome skin colouring – black and white and every wrong colour – it was a Jane Austen fan who replied to Cope in 1964 suggesting that perhaps she simply meant the dark circles under the eyes that accompany illness. Thus, it is likely that Cope's hypothesis of infective tuberculosis as the source of her illness was at least partially correct, after all."Critic's viewJohn Mullan Jane Austen's characters are preoccupied with illness. Mr Woodhouse shudders at every draught; Mary Musgrove fancies herself ill whenever there is no good dance or dinner invitation; Marianne Dashwood enacts an impressive psychosomatic illness when she is jilted by Willoughby. It is no accident that Mr Perry, the apothecary in Emma, can afford a hugely expensive coach. He has rich pickings among the local hypochondriacs.But illness in Austen can also be quick and dangerous. Everyone assumes Frank Churchill's adoptive mother is always pretending to be ill – until she suddenly dies.The vulnerability of flesh is taken for granted. We laugh at Mrs Bennet for being so delighted when her daughter Jane's illness keeps her at Netherfield, home of Mr Bingley. But it is real alarm that sends her sister Elizabeth across the fields to nurse her.Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion, written when she herself was ailing, is a record of physical frailty. Mrs Smith, Anne Elliot's gossipy friend, is reduced by illness to an impoverished invalid. Captain Harville's sister Fanny has just died as has Dick Musgrove. Austen makes illness the stuff of comedy, but only in the knowledge that every affliction might end in death.John MullanJane AustenHealthOwen Bowcottguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Milorad Pavic obituary Serbian master of the interactive novel'He thinks the way we dream," wrote the American critic Robert Coover of Milorad Pavic, the Serbian writer, who has died aged 80. When Pavic's masterpiece, Dictionary of the Khazars (1984; English translation 1988), appeared in France, it was hailed as "the first book of the 21st century". It is a novel presented as a reconstruction of three long-lost dictionaries – Jewish, Muslim and Christian – that recorded the lexicon relating to the events surrounding the ninth-century "Khazar polemics", during which representatives of the three religions were invited to convince a Khazar Khan of the advantages of their faiths. Although the Khan did choose one of them, his Caucasian state disappeared, his people were soon scattered and the outcome of the contest remained unknown because all three religions claimed victory.However, this is only the basic outline of this fascinating and rich literary feast. Composed in a non-linear manner, Dictionary of the Khazars invites the reader to jump from one entry to another and thus construct their own narrative out of many interconnected micro-stories.Reading the entries in different orders encourages the reader to take on an active role in the construction of a narrative from fragmentary and sometimes conflicting accounts, so each reader produces a slightly different story, and the number of combinations is endless. The overall impression the novel produces, however, is not of confrontation between these three religions, but between poetry, on one hand, and all (religious) dogmas on the other – a view that prompted the German literary theoretician Hans Robert Jauss to hail Dictionary of the Khazars as a manifesto of religious tolerance.was born in Belgrade to a distinguished family of intellectuals and writers. A polyglot from early childhood, he studied literature at Belgrade University and received his PhD from Zagreb University. After brief sojourns at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Vienna University, later taught the history of Serbian literature at the universities of Novi Sad and Belgrade and, as a visiting professor, in Freiburg and Regensburg, in south-west Germany. He authored several seminal books on Serbian cultural history, most importantly A History of Serbian Baroque Literature (1970), A History of Serbian Literature in Classicism and Early Romanticism (1979) and The Birth of Modern Serbian Literature (1983). Pavic also translated works by Aleksandr Pushkin and Lord Byron into Serbo-Croat and edited a number of collections of essays.In addition to his long academic publication list, Pavic authored 26 books of poetry, plays, short stories and novels. Dictionary of the Khazars brought him global fame and placed him in the pantheon of postmodern writers, alongside Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Julio Cortázar. Other important works followed in rapid succession: Landscape Painted With Tea (1988, English translation 1990), a "crossword" novel with the plot refracted in segments that a reader can reassemble by reading them "down" or "across"; The Inner Side of the Wind (1991, in English 1993), based on the myth of Hero and Leander; Last Love in Constantinople (1994, in English in 1998), a novel accompanied by a pack of Tarot cards that readers should use to construct their own sequence of the novel's 21 chapters. An erudite writer and an heir to traditions usually perceived as distinct, in his works Pavic brought together Byzantium and central Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, enlightenment tolerance and Romantic devotion to imagination, poetry and dreams.Pavic's works have been translated into 30 languages. His popularity continued to increase, even after critics had become fatigued by postmodernist literary experiments. In June 2009, a monument to Pavic was unveiled in front of the Library of Foreign Languages, in Moscow, an honour rarely bestowed on living authors.Pavic is survived by his second wife, Jasmina Mihajlovic, a literary critic and writer, and Ivan Pavic, a painter, his son from a previous marriage.• Milorad Pavic, writer, translator, and literary historian, born 15 October 1929; died 30 November 2009guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Tech Weekly podcast at CES: Plastic Logic's lightweight ereader It's day two of the Consumer Electronics Show, and one of the gadgets making its debut is the Que from Plastic Logic, a company founded in Cambridge. The company hopes to head the charge into ebooks with the Que – a lightweight touchscreen ereader that comes with a hefty price tag. Steven Glass from Plastic Logic talks to Bobbie Johnson, gives him a demonstration and explains the technology behind the gadget.Fixation Video's Will Head, and Matt Egan from PC Advisor, tell us what has caught their eye out on the show floor There's also a look around the in-car technology and healthy lifestyle sections of the North Hall here in the Las Vegas Convention Centre.Don't forget to...• Comment below...• Mail us at tech@guardian.co.uk• Get our Twitter feed for programme updates• Join our Facebook group• See our pics on Flickr/Post your tech picsBobbie JohnsonScott Cawley feeds.guardian.co.uk |
To autumn | John Keats by John KeatsSeason of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor,Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,Drows'd with the fumes of poppies, while thy hookSpares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keepSteady thy laden head across a brook;Or by a cider-press, with patient look,Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mournAmong the river sallows, borne aloftOr sinking as the light wind lives or dies;And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble softThe red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.John KeatsPoetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |