The complexities of using the word douchebag in an essay on Dante. The risks of attempting to take Thomas Kinkade seriously. A great answer to the “Have you really read all those books?” question. A home for unfinished novels. An almost instant bookshop.
Hull: An unemployed man has been fined £75 after putting up 200 posters asking for work. The posters did bring him a job, however – with Mecca Bingo, which has agreed to pay his fine. Wolverhampton: A man who called police to a domestic dispute has been jailed for six years after asking an officer
For the past 18 months, it turns out, I have slept in a former royal place of worship. This has been less picturesque than it sounds. The old chapel on my corner of Rye Lane, Peckham, south London — named the Hanover Chapel because two of George III’s sons supported its minister, W.B. Collyer —
Aberdeen: A woman has been fined £450 after admitting to drinking wine from a box while driving. When tested, she was three times over the legal alcohol limit. Portland: A missing persons search involving two lifeboats, a helicopter and up to 50 coastguard staff was launched after a surfboard and sail were seen floating in
Leeds: A giant woollen bobble hat has been stolen from a traffic-light junction box, where it was placed as part of a public art project. A man was later captured on CCTV wearing the hat: Jarrow: A 70-year-old man has been fined £250 after he continued to claim council-tax benefit, housing benefit and pension credit
The worth of long words in children’s books (the comments thread is the main bit). Academic criticism: still worth reading. A long view of librarianship. Words only used in exam answers. The aftermath of the great Oxford comma blogstorm. An American view of the questions English newspapers ask Alan Hollinghurst.
This is the third entry in our new series collecting notable stories from Britain’s regional newspapers. It appears here each Friday, and continues on Twitter in the meantime. Bournemouth: The family and friends of a fallen soldier have repatriated a formerly stray dog that he adopted while serving in Afghanistan. Brighton: The owner of a
What’s the best sort of pencil to read with? Nabokov proposes the smiley-face emoticon, in a 1969 interview. It is possible to have a multi-format e-reader, but only with some awkward hacking. What’s fine and not fine in antiquarian booksellers’ descriptions. David Mamet is on the right now, but where exactly was he before? There
Here is the second entry in our new series collating some of the most intriguing stories from across our local and regional press. We are planning to run these blog-posts every Friday, but you can also follow Local Interest on Twitter for updates throughout the week: Grimsby: Two consignments of radioactive dried mushrooms have been
Tim Parks keeps digging, interestingly and valuably, on the idea that writing in other languages is becoming tilted towards ease of translation into English. John Self considers the charms and shortcomings of Ali Smith. I have missed not only Bloomsday but also Harriet Beecher Stowe day. In Osaka, there is a house made out of
For decades, The Spectator’s Portrait of the Week has provided a concise record of national and international news. But there are interesting or at least intriguing stories in our local and regional press, too. Here are a dozen: A 21-year-old cannabis grower from Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, has been sentenced to 80 hours’ community service after he
An exciting new bookshop that shut down after three weeks (on purpose). A young man who helped a branch of the previous bookshop go out of business. The logical (but not necessarily pleasant) conclusion of the “Jane Austen remix” trend. A short history of the heavy-metal umlaut. Imaginary movie posters for David Foster Wallace fans.
A way of becoming very drunk while stocktaking your bookshop’s science-fiction section (via). A collector’s guide to true crime, including an unexpected connection between Dennis Nilsen and Virginia Woolf. A celebration of the typographic specimen book that is rather lovely to look at. An easy way into Jean Rhys – at least, easy if you
Philip Larkin is not the best poet in HMP Norwich, but could console himself by licking a colouring book. The effects of high-speed rail would be familiar to Dickens. Martin Amis’s complaints would be familiar to Proust. John Fowles’s desk is emigrating to Texas. Ebooks are indeed the wild frontier; and Google might not be
If you want to read the kind of tribute properly owing to the great children’s author Diana Wynne Jones, who died on Saturday, you should probably go elsewhere. (You might start with Jenny Davidson, an American blogger, academic and children’s writer who has a Wynne-Jonesian sensibility and a gift for conveying enthusiasm in print; Neil
Much twittering and blogging occurred yesterday about a new publishing format called the “flipback” – a species of compact paperback. Word first reached me from Canada, and doubtless the conversation spread even further than that. The main talking point was the clever headline that a subeditor on the Guardian had given the story: Could this
Peter Robins emailed through the following, in response to my post on “extra features” in literature, yesterday – Pete Hoskin Eighteenth-century authors were deep into this sort of thing. Pope was continually reissuing the Dunciad with extras to adapt it to his latest enemies: a new fourth book, a complete set of fake scholarly apparatus.
Here is a selection of news from elsewhere on the literary web: A woman in New York is attempting to smell 300,000 books, making notes as she goes. As of 12 December, she was up to 150. It’s art. F Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, John Buchan and Isaac Babel are among the authors who may
When they found Hans Blix dead, his throat was slit and his tongue was pulled through the hole, an arrangement apparently known as a ‘Cuban necktie’. William Gibson did not do the deed – it was the work of an overenthusiastic hit man – and nor is he the person who commissioned the hit; their
There is an evil genius in Peckham Library. Not among the patrons: the book stock is sound enough, but, were you researching a plan for world domination, you’d want more extensive reference shelves and perhaps quicker Wi-Fi. No, the evil genius is on the staff. He or she was responsible for the offer that