Hmm, so publishers finally catch up with Foyle’s, do they? A million years ago, when I was a slip of a gel — well, in the 1980s, maybe even the 1990s — Foyle’s bookshop used to shelve its books, not by subject, nor by genre, nor even by colour of
Tag: English literature
Total 29 Posts
Yesterday in the Observer there was a wonderful article on libraries and their function in the 21st century (here), and the various purposes they serve. The most interesting part (well, it was all interesting — do read it), the most worrying part was, I thought, where one librarian told of
Brent council in north London has just rubber-stamped the closure of six of its libraries. We all know why this is outrageous (try: the £100m cuts imposed on the local government being equalled in Brent by spending £100m on a new town hall). That is not what astonishes me —
A post of a post today. A blogger, Derek Sivers, has reproduced a fabulous series of graphs Kurt Vonnegut drew, to explain why we love drama — or, more precisely, why we love stories. He shows how the emotional structure — misery, rescue, hope, fear, relief — is built (and
A long post today, so bear with me (or go and make a sandwich, whichever seems more sensible). The wonderful Lee Jackson, onlie begetter of Victorian London website, and author of splendid Victorian mysteries, has written on the early days of the theatrical Sweeney Todd. I thought I would add
Wallander is leaving us, says Henning Mankell. I’ve written a (fairly frivolous) piece on detectives abandoning their readers in the Telegraph this morning (here). But while I was writing it, I was actually thinking about the instalment, and how attuned we are to it. Dickens, of course, was the king
The Independent (god bless its little prescriptive heart) has listed the 50 books every child should have read. As we know, the Education Secretary has said every child should read a book a week (with two weeks off for good behaviour, apparently). So this is only a year’s list. But
The Guardian today had a promising headline, ‘The Seductive Power of Lists’, which I fell on, because lists are one of my favourite things — magic, incantatory. The Guardian‘s piece, however, is about Booker lists, prize lists, books-to-read-before-you-die lists. Not what I think of when I think of lists at
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