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| Radio catch-up: Woman's Hour, Today, The News Quiz and Money Box Live Radio 4 's listening figures are the best for a decade. The station deserves themCatch up with:Woman's Hour Will Self and Ralph Steadman on Today The News Quiz Money Box LiveLast week brought the giddying news that Radio 4 has attracted more than 10m listeners – a 10-year high for the station. Is anyone surprised? Serious times call for serious broadcasting, etc. But if the economy has given Radio 4 a lift, that's only part of the story – controller Mark Damazer is doing outstandingly well. The station's big-hitter shows such as Today, Woman's Hour, Just a Minute, From Our Own Correspondent and PM are all strong at the moment; new programmes and presenters have been successfully introduced; weaker elements have been removed (does anyone miss Go for It?) and the calibre of voices to be heard is unparalleled.Take Woman's Hour – Jane Garvey is sounding warm and assured, after a bumpy start, and Jenni Murray continues to be queen of the airwaves when she's at the helm. (Did someone really add her name to the list on the George Lamb/presenters we hate blog? No, that can't have happened...) In Wednesday's edition which you can listen to here Murray interviewed Serena Williams, who was determined to plug her new book every second sentence and stick to a few cheery anecdotes, but Murray drew her gently into more thoughtful reflections on her sister's death and her experience of racism in her early days on the tennis circuit. Then came the fabulous news that The Archers has inspired a spin-off in possibly the unlikeliest of places – Kabul. We heard the theme tune ("the Afghan equivalent of dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum," noted Murray mischievously) followed by a piece presented by Felicity Finch – or Ruth of Ambridge fame – which managed to be lovely, funny and shocking (detailing the everyday misogyny of life in Kabul).Damazer has shown confidence in bringing in new presenters – Justin Webb and Evan Davis on Today, Julian Worricker on You and Yours, Sandi Toksvig on The News Quiz. Webb was a contentious replacement for Ed Stourton, whose removal was one of Radio 4's big fumbles of recent times, but really they're very similar broadcasters – smooth, unflappable (and, yes, very upper-middle class). Still, Today's magic was in evidence in Sarah Montague's interview with Will Self and Ralph Steadman on Thursday (2 hrs 22 mins 33 seconds in): listen to it here. Hats off, Ms Montague, for managing not to laugh in response to any of the verbal grenades the pair were lobbing about. Self on going on election campaigns: "It is martyrdom, you understand. Almost invariably David Hare will be there".Sandi Toksvig has proved a terrific, witty choice as host of The News Quiz (listen to last weekend's edition here), and Worricker has done the seemingly impossible and erased much of the whiff of naffness from You and Yours. Like Money Box, it's easy to groan when it comes on, but when they're tackling topics such as negotiating the mortgages market, as Money Box Live did on Wednesday (catch up with it here). Don't you find it reassuring that they're around?Of the new triumphs, Sunday evening's Americana will surely become one of the station's stalwarts, and The Unbelievable Truth has slipped beautifully into the roster of sparkly panel games. This week, the 15-minute daily drama slot stars the brilliant Maxine Peake, and the Book of the Week, Selina Hasting's biography of Evelyn Waugh is read gorgeously by Barbara Flynn. Listen to Flynn articulating the painful details of Waugh's love affairs and it's impossible not to be seduced .There is the odd blip – hello Rudy's Rare Records, what a relief your run has finished – but, overall, I find life would be much diminished without Radio 4 for company. Do you agree?RadioTV and radioRadio industryRadio 4Camilla Redmondguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Palin's book tour to include stop at Fort Hood Sarah Palin's tour to promote her new memoir will include a stop at Fort Hood to benefit the victims of the shooting rampage ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
A weekend where it's all about the books Too busy to ever get down to some serious reading for pleasure? Then a weekend retreat in Sussex devoted to the perusal of prose could be for youIt's been years since I really had time to read for pleasure. At school and university I always felt guilty reading fiction when I should have been studying. Since I started work I barely have time to read anything but emails and when I do actually sit down with a good read, it's late at night when I can barely get through a page without nodding off.So I was intrigued to hear about a holiday where all you do is read: no sightseeing, no watersports, no family and friends to entertain – just serious time with a book.Every month the Soho House Literary Salon – that's book club to you and me – hosted by journalist and Radio 4 playwright Damian Barr, meets in the private London members' club Shoreditch House. It is a testament to Damian's standing in the literary world that this is the only event at Shoreditch House that's open to non-members, where you can mix with journalists, authors and playwrights and listen to them read from their latest works.The Reading Weekend is an expansion of the concept, a residential book club dedicated solely to the enjoyment of literature, and held in an equally prestigious setting, Tilton House in Berwick, Sussex.Tilton House is the former residence of economist John Maynard Keynes and next door to Charleston, a stately home and once the country meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group. The Georgian mansion is now home to Shaun Treloar and Polly Moore, who regularly host retreats, from screenwriting courses to sculpture workshops and yoga breaks.Polly and Damian were waiting for me on the doorstep – Damian in full pyjama and dressing gown ensemble. Inside, portraits of Keynes' ballerina wife Lydia Lopokova still adorn the walls, and books litter every surface. My bedroom had a traditional tartan rug and hot water bottle and a book on my pillow, which was mine to keep. For anyone who had neglected to bring their own reading material, the library was well-stocked with classics old and new. Once settled in, guests gathered for champagne by the fireside.The company was, unsurprisingly, bookish; writers, journalists, screenwriters and publishers – though those who simply love to read are equally welcome. Damian had a brilliant ability to put everyone at ease – aided by his stock of Taittinger and homemade damson gin.Dinner – a long, sociable affair – was chunky soup, crusty homebaked bread, salads and old-fashioned puddings served on the wooden tables in the kitchen. After telling us to turn off our phones and not use our laptops, Damian suggested we follow his lead and slip into something more comfortable, so we all returned to the lounge in our pyjamas and snuggled up on the sofas to enjoy that childish delight – being read a bedtime story.Damian honed his "reader in residence" role at London's Andaz hotel, the first to add "bedtime stories" to its in-room menu, so he's well-versed in vocalising tales to pyjama-clad strangers. A description of Charleston was appropriate given our surroundings, and set the mood for visiting the house over the weekend, while Miriam, the haunting short story by Truman Capote, was all the more chilling given our isolated location.Bad weather was forecast, so Damian suggested we next take inspiration from Mary Shelley – who famously invented Frankenstein after telling scary stories with Byron and co on a stormy night – and imagine our own monsters. We discussed possible characters, but with full stomachs, a warm fire and plenty of quince vodka in our bloodstream, the results were a little short on literary masterpieces.I was up early on Saturday for my bibliotherapy appointment – a one-to-one session to diagnose guests' reading "difficulties" – with Ella Berthoud, bibliotherapist from The School of Life. Before the weekend, we'd been sent questionnaires for her analysis, and though I had confessed a love for the historical novel, Ella pointed out most of my preferred authors and titles fell into the magical realism category, and suggested some titles from the genre.We also chatted about my life and she recommended my boyfriend and I read aloud to each other. I stifled a laugh at the thought of his face should I propose giving The Wire a miss one night to read to me, so instead she came up with a more realistic option of revisiting some of my childhood favourites by reading aloud to my little sister.A leisurely stroll to the Charleston gift shop (the house is closed in winter) was followed by a mad dash back through torrents of rain, to be greeted by a steaming bowl of soup and the pleasure of having nothing to do all afternoon but bury my nose in a novel.Penguin, the weekend's sponsor, sent along two authors that evening to read from their work and answer questions. Sathnam Sanghera read from his memoir, The Boy With a Topknot, and Naomi Alderman joined us for dinner in the library to read a steamy scene from her new book, The Lessons.This meal was more formal than the others, set at a beautifully decorated table with delicious artichokes, guinea fowl and fig frangipane with pear mascarpone. After an evening of erudite conversation, we moved on to a game of charades, which after a fairly civilised start quickly deteriorated into something altogether less literary; we began with re-enactments of Bloomsbury Group classics, but it was Damian's hilarious rendition of Top Gun we'll remember longest.The next morning saw several of our party slightly worse for wear, but still determined to tackle a country walk as intended. Welly-clad, we charged up the hill onto the South Downs Way for views over four counties.At the end of the weekend my only disappointment was that I hadn't managed to do as much reading as I'd hoped – what with the lengthy game of Scrabble, visiting Charleston and going on the Sunday hike, the trip had been so much fun I had fallen into my usual trap of socialising rather than reading.If your aim is to get through War and Peace, you might be better locking yourself in your bedroom.• The next reading weekend hosted by Damian Barr at Tilton (+44 (0) 7711 306443, mrdlbarr@yahoo.com or tiltonhouse.co.uk/workshops) runs from 19-21 February and costs £385pp, inc accommodation, food and drink, bibliotherapy and guest author, David Nicholls. Berwick is served by Southern Railway (southernrailway.com) from London Victoria, £23.20 rtnCultural tripsWeekend breaksUnited Kingdomguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
What's the point of blurbs? A clutch of hackneyed jingles about how marvellous the author is is de rigueur on book covers – but do they really serve any useful role?There's a lot of received wisdom in the publishing world – for instance, if you write non-fiction, your book needs a subtitle. Never mind that fiction doesn't require that extra bit of explication (Crime & Punishment: Murder and Redemption in the Empire of the Tsars anyone?) if you write non-fiction you simply must spell out what you're up to for prospective readers! This may be a wise policy or it may be nonsense, nobody knows.Then there are blurbs, the more of which you can plaster on your paperback the better. Usually these are from newspaper reviews reduced by your sales people to a string of superlatives here, a comparison to somebody more famous than you are there. If the blurb comes from a review by a famous person, then they may just run with the name of the celebrity alone ("The Da Vinci Code is f*cking awesome!" – Salman Rushdie). Do these blurbs – many of which could be transferred from book to book without great difficulty – actually sway readers? I mean, if you believed them then you'd think every book published is, like, really amazing. Perhaps for an eye glancing across the stacks in Waterstone's, a familiar name (Bill Bryson, say) on an unfamiliar book (Lost Cosmonaut, for instance) might cause the browser to at least pause. A book without blurbs can look fishy – did nobody read it? Is it that bad? On the other hand, Dedalus regularly publishes books with few if any endorsements, but I have faith that they will be superior to 99.9% of the titles which appear slathered in fawning praise.According to Clive Barker, the quote from Stephen King that graced the covers of the Books of Blood – "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker" – ignited both his sales and his career. But Clive Barker's books were something new and exciting in horror; if they hadn't been any good, then the blurb wouldn't have worked. Still, that celebrity endorsement helped steer readers in his direction. My own publisher once tried something similar, sending a copy of Strange Telescopes to a superstar of travel writing. I was grateful the publisher was thinking about me, the snag was that I couldn't abide the work of the aforementioned superstar, whose unctuous, chucklesome, look-at-me schtick screamed of a craven appeal for approval. I shuddered when sent a mock cover which featured a made-up quote from this literary criminal, but decided to remain silent until the crisis became real, at which point I might have had to perform a hex, or commit ritual seppuku – for rest assured there is no way the publisher would have refused an endorsement no matter how much I argued against it. Fortunately it never materialised: I'd like to think because the celebrity hated my book, but it's more likely that he is bombarded with manuscripts and simply didn't look at it.… which leads us to another question, never considered by publishers: how many readers reject a book because they loathe the authority endorsing it in a blurb? For example, I can't stand the twee films of Wes Anderson. If he praised a book I probably wouldn't read it. And there are other red flags: it is axiomatic that comparisons to Kafka or Borges will always be made on the most superficial basis, usually by someone who doesn't know much about Kafka or Borges. The same goes for comparisons to Philip K Dick: in my student days I read Jeff Noon's Vurt because it was compared to PKD. But it read less like Ubik than it did a bizarre SF version of one of those tedious features about rave culture that appeared in broadsheets in the 90s. The comparison was based on the presence of imaginary drugs in the plot, and little else. As a connoisseur of the crap blurb, I recently made an exciting discovery on the back of Andrzej Stasiuk's Fado, which I will cite in full:"Stasiuk is an accomplished stylist with an eye for the telling detail that brings characters and situations to life … I caught a flavour of Hamsun, Sartre, Genet and Kafka in Stasiuk's scalpel-like but evocative writing."Irvine Welsh (New York Times)First we have a dubious authority (Welsh), likely to be as off-putting to some readers as he is attractive to others. Then there is the Kafka reference. Also, considering that Stasiuk is a Pole steeped in central and eastern European culture, it is curious that Welsh "caught" so many purely western European "flavours" (bar the cliché Kafka ref, of course). Any half-informed reader may wonder whether this blurb is even remotely accurate.But what makes this blurb truly special, and why I single it out for praise is that it has a concealed double function. Indeed, it is as much an endorsement for Irvine Welsh as it is for Stasiuk. Essentially, here the perpetrator of the atrocity that was Porno is telegraphing to erudite NYT readers: I'm a SERIOUS WRITER. Look at how many great authors I just named in one sentence! See? I'm literary, me. I wonder: did Welsh's blurb sell any books? And if so: whose? FictionPublishingDaniel Kalderguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Notes and queries: How they counted the years in the BC era; what noise does a giraffe make? How they counted the years in the BC era; what noise does a giraffe make? How to solve sudokus - including the killersBefore AD, what did people of the BC era call their years? The dominance of one calendar for world events is quite recent and many other calendars remain in use: the Ethiopian calendar, for instance, has 13 months. The references AD and BC are sometimes replaced by CE and BCE: Common Era and Before the Common Era.The Roman calendar was counted Ab urbe condita ("from the foundation of the city"), in 753 BC; and it continued in use until the Anno Domini calendar was introduced in AD 525. The monk who calculated AD from AUC forgot that the Emperor Augustus ruled for four years as Octavian before he changed his name, and this error remains in the system. Also, as he counted in Roman, not Arabic, numerals, he did not include the years 0 BC and AD 0.The Muslim calendar runs from the Hijra, Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. Like the Christian calendar, it displaced earlier calendars such as the Zoroastrian one in Persia, which dates from about 1200 BC. The Muslim calendar is a lunar one, but Iranians still celebrate Nowruz, the new year in the solar Zoroastrian calendar, at the spring equinox each March.The Chinese calendar dates back to about 2700 BC and the Hindu calendar to about 3100 BC. The Jewish calendar has an even earlier starting point, 5,770 years ago, calculated as the date of the creation as described in scripture.Roger Crosskey, London W10Official records of the Roman empire and its successors used two systems in parallel. One, used in legal documents, dated from the accession of the current emperor, and started again with each new emperor (a system still used with each new monarch in English law). The other, used in historical works, was AUC, Ab urbe condita. In "the year of the consulship of Probius Junior" (1278 AUC) Dionysius Exiguus, a member of the Roman curia, invented the AD system by recording that it was 525 years "since the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ".He probably arrived at that date by looking up the recorded dates of incidents mentioned in the Christian gospels. Matthew 2:1 has Jesus born during the reign of Herod, who died in 749 AUC after a long illness. Luke 2:2-6 has Jesus born at the time of the census of Judea instituted by Quirinius, which took place in 759 AUC. Dionysius seems to have decided on a compromise, putting the birth of Jesus between the two ascertained dates, at 753 AUC.Much later, in AD 731 (1484 AUC), the custom of dating events AD, using Dionysius's date, was originated by the historian the Venerable Bede.Donald Rooum, London E1 I can do passable dogs, pigs, lions, snakes etc for the children, but what noise does a giraffe make?When my daughter was two I recall seeing her turning the pages of the children's book Dear Zoo, making the relevant animal noises – a roar for the lion, a hiss for the snake and so on. When it came to the giraffe there was a pause for thought, then she shouted "Tall! Tall!"Royston Robertson, Broadstairs, KentI'm not sure giraffes make a noise, but in Kenya on holiday I was told giraffes employ a foster-mother system whereby one or two adults look after the young of the whole group so that the rest of the adults can forage for leaves. So if you're making animal noises to keep the children amused because you're minding them, then you're probably imitating a giraffe already.Louise Harley-Smeur, Munich, GermanyA giraffe is the only animal with no vocal chords, so makes no noise at all. Source of this information – a quiz at the Dunelm Ridge, 29 December 2009.Mike Rayner, DurhamWho cares? Make any noise you like and tell them that's the noise a giraffe makes – who's going to know any different?Alan Paterson, London N8Why is it that I can solve the Guardian's easy and hard sudokus, but never manage to complete the medium ones?I put it to the test myself, playing sudoku 1,429 and would have judged it about medium difficulty as stated. On this statistically significant sample of one, I judge that the assertion that medium puzzles are harder than hard puzzles to be incorrect.Allan Postgate, Bromsgrove, WorcsAnyone can solve any sudoku (including killers) any time by using a pencil with a rubber on the end. You just put in the possibilities and rub out as you eliminate them. Simple!Jane Jones, Hoole, ChesterAny answers?My computer is getting rather slow. It's five years old. What's that in human years?S Kirby, Esbjerg, DenmarkWhat happens to the food that TV chefs cook? Does the camera crew eat it, or is it given to the homeless? Melanie Murray, SalfordWhere does the curry in "curry favour" originate?John Robinson, LiverpoolSend questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.WildlifeHistoryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |