- Fund for 'climate justice' launched
- Former RAF Machrihanish sold for £1
- Loach film takes Cannes Jury Prize
- Scorching day for marathon runners
- Five held over £600,000 drugs haul
- Anti-independence campaign 'soon'
- Half of female refugees 'raped'
- Call by MPs to scrap fuel duty rise
- Saltire Games ban 'ridiculous'
- Scottish drink-drive plans welcomed
Books
The Butler Did It: The story of serial killer Archibald Hall
Serial killer Archibald Hall, the ‘Monster Butler’, hoped screenwriter Paul Pender would write his story. Their relationship turned ugly, forcing Pender to flee to America. Ten years after Hall’s death, the tale is told in a new book by Pender and, soon, a film starring Malcolm McDowell. By Stephen McGinty
Book review: Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes
Love and the Gulag: A remarkable tale of devotion comes to light after more than 50 years
Bookworm: Julia Donaldson is looking forward to a busy autumn
The football season may be over, but next year gleams with promise for at least one Scottish team. Step forward the Blue Brazil, aka Cowdenbeath, champions of the Second Division and bound for glory in the First next year.
Interview: Paul French, author of Midnight in China
Pamela Werner was 19 when her heart and her body were left under a ‘haunted watchtower’ in Peking in 1937. Paul French tells David Robinson how he can finally name the killer
Book review: Skios by Michale Frayn
ONE of the most endearing things about Michael Frayn is his addiction to farce. He may be the playwright of nuclear physics (Copenhagen), a familial memoirist of delicacy (My Father’s Fortune) and a translator of Chekhov and Tolstoy, but he likes nothing better than love triangles, misunderstandings and dropped trousers.
Book reviews: The Cookbook Library | A People’s History of London | Afghanistan
Michael Kerrigan looks at the week’s new literary releases
Poem of the week: Lyrebird by Niall Campbell
A lyrebird is an Australian ground-bird, famed for its ability to imitate sounds: it can copy anything it hears, from dogs barking to a rifle firing to a burglar alarm
Book reviews: Sic | The Art of Fielding | The Address Book | My Beautiful Game
William Leith looks at this week’s paperback releases
Book review: Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale
A Victorian woman’s place is in the divorce courts when a scandalous diary comes to light
Book review: RU by Kim Thuy
KIM Thuy is Vietnamese and writes in French. Her family belonged to the Saigon upper-bourgeoisie who had done well when Indo-China was part of the French empire.
Book review: Autumn Laing by Alex Miller
An old woman’s memories evoke an entire continent of art in an epic of Australia
Book review: Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen
The author of The Corrections is in a petulant mood throughout this sad collection of essays
Book review: Ignorance by Michele Roberts
MICHELE Roberts’s feminist credentials go back a long way and cover many different subjects, from superb historical fiction on the Brontës and Wordsworth’s French mistress, to more contemporary, experimental novels about life in 1970s London.
The future is not Orange
The Orange Prize for Fiction is looking for a new name and a new sponsor after the phone company announced it was stopping its support.
Scotland’s favourite book a novel ‘so bad it gives novels a bad name’
LITERARY snobs and lovers of the Scottish novel look away now. Scotland’s favourite book is the best-selling and much-maligned The Da Vinci Code, according to a new poll.
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Book extract: The original Mrs Robinson
Kate Summerscale’s book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, revisits 19th century New Town Edinburgh and a scandal that rocked Victorian society. In this exclusive extract, Isabella meets a handsome young doctor
Interview: James Runcie, author of Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death
James Runcie, son of the former Archibishop of Canterbury, tells David Robinson why he puts his faith in a crime-busting cleric in his new novel.
Bookworm: Oh Canada
WHAT is it, that missing ingredient that can transform a book festival from being a dutiful gathering of the well-read and well-meaning to something altogether more magical? Whatever it was, the eighth Ullapool book festival last weekend had it by the barrel-load.
Book review: The Red House, by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon remains best-known for his 2003 bestseller, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, narrated by a 15-year-old boy, Christopher, “a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties”, who uncovers the broken relationships in his own family while thinking he is tracking down the killer of a neighbour’s dog.
Book review: The Beauty in the Beast, by Hugh Warwick
Hugh Warwick loves hedgehogs. He has spent his life writing about them, talking about them, rescuing them and most people in these parts know him from his vocal role opposing the 2003 hedgehog cull in the Uists. He even has a tattoo of a hedgehog on one leg. As it didn’t hurt as much as he expected, he set out to spend time with 15 species – and those people who are just as passionate about them as he is about hedgehogs – to choose one for the other leg.
1 commentBook review: Railsea, by China Miéville
China Miéville has played with trains before – in Iron Council, the socialist refugees lived on a “perpetual train”, which forged ahead on rails taken up from behind it. He has also played around with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick – in The Scar, a flotilla of ships was seeking the Leviathan-like avanc, hoping to both harpoon and harness it as a means of locomotion.
Book review: The Forrests, by Emily Perkins
“All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Whatever the truth of Tolstoy’s observation, unhappy, or what are now called dysfunctional, families are meat and drink to the novelist, and not only because they offer more material.
Book review: Tales from the Mall, by Ewan Morrison
Welcome to a new kind of 21st-century storytelling. This remarkable collection of writing is hard to categorise in any orthodox sense, but it is a brilliant and often profound form of literature that says more about the modern human condition than a hundred more conventional novels might.
Poetry: Charlotte Runcie – ‘Staying In’
Each year the Scottish Poetry Library asks a guest editor to put together an online anthology, Best Scottish Poems. Last week, the SPL posted on its website 2011’s selection, which has been chosen by poet Roddy Lumsden.
Book review: Reality, Reality, by Jackie Kay
Anyone who attended Jackie Kay’s appearance at this year’s Aye Write festival cannot fail to have noticed how close she is to becoming a National Treasure. A sell-out at the biggest hall, she had her adoring audience in the palm of her hand, as she read out one or two stories from this new collection, Reality, Reality. But what happens to an author once thought of as cutting-edge, or even marginal, once she achieves that level of popularity? What happens to her work?
Book reviews: Say Her Name | Besieged: Life Under Fire in a Sarajevo Street | You’re Looking Very Well | 15 Seconds
William Leith reviews the latest paperback releases
Book review: Banksy: The Man Behind The Wall | Seven Years With Banksy
One poor memoir, one fine guide to a career in graffiti – but nobody gets behind the artist’s mask.
Book review: In One Person, by John Irving
Epigraphs: who needs them? Damned by polymath Barry Humphries as “a high falutin’ mannerism”, they too often seem superfluous – fiction’s bling.
Erikka Askeland: Upside of settling down with a book
THERE’S little that compares to immersing yourself in a good book. Even reading a so-so book can allow hours to pass without you noticing – just ask any fan of Dan Brown.
Stuart Kelly: Sales figures don’t necessarily earn literary merit
St Andrews University was to hold a conference on Harry Potter as literature, my first thought was at least the delegates would be home by lunchtime.
National Library modernisation agreed
A shake-up of the way the National Library of Scotland is run has been agreed despite concerns about government centralisation.
Harry Potter is great literature, say academics
THEY were a publishing phenomenon that worked magic on young readers everywhere, but left some literary critics far from spellbound.
1 commentBooksellers award Scotland three titles
Scotland not only has Britain’s best city library, but it has the UK’s best bookshop and bookshop manager too, according to the annual industry awards for booksellers.
£2m facelift for library storage site
The National Library of Scotland’s storage site at Causwayside in Edinburgh, home to more than two million maps, atlases, reference books and periodicals, is to get a £2 million external overhaul.
Winterson to take up university post in home city
Acclaimed author Jeanette Winterson is to become a professor of creative writing.
Interview: Hilary Mantel, author of Bring Up The Bodies
Man Booker winner Hilary Mantel tells David Robinson the secret of twisting long-dead characters into her readers’ minds
Books in brief: Anglo-Saxon Art | The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After | Photography
Michael Kerrigan offers his view on recent books
Book review: If You’re Reading This, I’m Already Dead
Andrew Nicoll enchants with the story of a circus acrobat who impersonates a monarch
Interview: Sara Sheridan, author of Brighton Belle
Sara Sheridan tells Susan Mansfield about her new ‘cosy noir’ sleuth and why, for a historical novelist, the 1950s is a gift that keeps on giving
Book review: Sweet Revenge
GERTRUDE Stein said that the problem of her hometown, Oakland, was that “there is no there there”. I’ve always felt the same applies to Simon Cowell.
Book review: Target London
SHORTLY before dawn on 13 June 13, 1944, the crew of a Royal Navy motorboat patrolling the English Channel saw “a bright horizontal moving flame” in the sky above the coast of France.
Book review: The Panopticon
Stuart Kelly hails a novel that gets inside the soul of its troubled heroine
Bookworm: “You mean, I should just cross out Harry Potter and put Sidney Chambers?”
Snippets from the literary world...
Bid to honour Charles Dickens’ Scottish connections
One of the world’s leading authorities on the work of Charles Dickens is planning to establish the first Dickens Fellowship in Scotland.
Interview: Tom Watson MP, author of Dial M For Murdoch
FOR years, Tom Watson has worked to uncover the truth about News International but, he tells Stephen McGinty, it has taken a personal toll
Tim Cornwell: The future for books makes gloomy reading
IN EVELYN Waugh’s classic satirical novel Decline and Fall, the headmaster of a fictional Welsh boys’ boarding school, Llanaba Castle, makes sure to invite the local newspaper to a school sports day where things are certain to go calamitously wrong.
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Stephen McGinty: World of academia bites back
Overbearing publishers who charge tens of thousands of pounds for annual subscriptions to their respected journals have had it far too good for far too long, writes Stephen McGinty
1 commentBookworm: ‘With a few grand exceptions...there are very few theatrical versions of the journalist’
Snippets from the past seven days in the literary world
- Scottish independence: I don’t want ‘separatism’ says Sir Tom Farmer
- Vatican poised to make more arrests in papal leaks scandal
- Rangers administration: End game nears for fallen icon
- USA 5 - 1 Scotland: Donovan grabs hattrick as Scots routed in Florida
- Rangers administration: Duff & Phelps ‘hopeful’ that Taxman will agree to CVA
- Scottish independence: I don’t want ‘separatism’ says Sir Tom Farmer
- Scottish independence: Labour voters ‘will deliver independence’
- Rangers administration: End game nears for fallen icon
- Leaders: Blurred vision on independence
- Rangers administration: Duff & Phelps ‘hopeful’ that Taxman will agree to CVA
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
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