Fly-fishing

Tuesday

David Profumo

‘I am haunted by waters’: Norman Maclean and his lyrical ‘little blue book’

From our UK edition

Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one Hollywood shyster: ‘When we had bastards like you out west we shot them for coyote bait.’ The novelist Pete Dexter once described him as ‘an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock’n’ roll’ – and that was only from a photograph.

Thursday

Maggie Fergusson

The most bizarre museum heist ever

They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in Iraq and a modern-day Schindler who, as USAID’s only Arabic-speaking American employee, arranged for hundreds of Iraqis to find safe haven in the US. In the process, he developed PTSD, sleepwalked through a hotel window, flung himself from a ledge and plunged, nearly, to his death. Then there’s the stranger-than-fiction Edwin Rist, a brilliant young flautist who, on a pitch-black night nine years ago, in pursuit of an obsession with rare bird feathers, risked years in jail in one of the most brazen and bizarre museum heists ever accomplished. Yet Johnson and Rist are made for one another. Within pages I was hooked. This is a weird and wonderful book.