Religion

‘Whig and Tory Scratch and Bite’, by Aaron Hill Whig and Tory scratch and bite, Just as hungry dogs we see: Toss a bone 'twixt two, they fight, Throw a couple, they agree. Tribal party politics are three-hundred years old in Britain. So is the fashion for satire which aspires to rise above it all. The British people have been dealing with political parties since the 1670s. It was then that a faction led by the Earl of Shaftesbury tried to have Parliament pass a law to prevent Charles II’s brother James from succeeding to the throne. Charles had no legitimate children so James was next in line.

Born in 1934 in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka is the author of more than twenty plays, ten volumes of poetry, two novels, seven collections of essays and five autobiographical works. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He was the first black African man to win the prestigious prize His latest book, Of Africa, is a 200-page polemic that attempts to understand the contradictory nature of African politics. Two important questions that arise from Soyinka’s book are: what is Africa? And what do we understand of its history? Soyinka expends considerable effort in his book discussing how the nihilist nature of fundamentalist Islam is destroying societies in certain African nations: particularly in Somali, Mali, and Nigeria.

Since the publication of her debut collection, Satan Says in 1980, which was awarded the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award, Sharon Olds has become a prominent - and controversial - voice in American poetry. Olds’ work has been given many unflattering adjectives from her harshest critics: self-indulgent, sensationalist, solipsistic, and pornographic, to name a few. While her confessional, and overtly autobiographical style, may not be to every critics’ taste, Olds’ candid voice, describing her own troubled childhood; the human body; and a world which very often displays fear, violence, love and kindness, in equal measure, has seen her become one of the most widely read poets of her generation.

‘To the Grave’ Unclasp thy womb, thou mortuary shrine, And take the worst part of the best we had. Thou hast no harbourage for things divine, That thou had'st any part was yet too bad. Graves, for the grave, are fit, unfit for thee Was our sweet branch of youthful royalty. Thou must restore each atom back again When that day comes that stands beyond all night. His fame (meanwhile) shall here on earth remain, Lo thus we have divided our delight: Heaven keeps his spirit stalled amongst the just, We keep his memory, and thou his dust. Prince Henry was the eldest son of James I and VI (that’s first of England, sixth of Scotland). In 1612 he died at the age of eighteen. An extraordinary period of spontaneous popular mourning followed.

I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After a night time drive under the arms of blue mossed oaks we made it to Emory University and took our seats and the curtain rose on a Victorian living room. Cautiously, with a canine playfulness, from out behind a sofa, tromped a dinosaur. I kept thinking of this moment as I read Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala.  Originally published in 1926 before he became a renowned playwright, Wilder attempted the same tricks here. He interjects Keats, Virgil, and even incarnate Mercury, into a contemporary 1920s narrative, in order to argue that the human condition has never improved, that culture is only a jacket that fits over a skeleton.

The Jamaican High Commission in London held a party last night to launch a patois translation of the Gospels. The translation, published by the Bible Society, is the culmination of 20 years work by academics at the University of the West Indies and other institutions, studying the rules of the creole created by plantation slaves and committing them fully to paper for the first time. The project has been part-funded by donations from congregations whose primary (and often only) language is patois rather than English, the language in which scripture has always been written and read in the nominally English-speaking Caribbean. This is an important cultural moment.

Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this network. His first book in twelve years, John Saturnall’s Feast, explores how the Civil War affected the career of a 17th century chef, the kitchens of great country houses and the symbolism of food. Its mythic centre is a pagan rite belonging to a pre-Christian British people, in which serving and eating food was the basis of an egalitarian community. In Charles I’s reign the one person left alive with the key to this feast is an orphan called John Saturnall, who has gone to work as a kitchen boy at the local manor.

It is lit-fiction season: that time of the year of when the premier novelists of the age dominate the market. Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks and Rose Tremain all have new books out, and Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoirs are to be launched this week, so many newspapers are devoting themselves to regurgitating stale observations about The Satanic Verses ahead of the main and keenly guarded event. Of the new books, Zadie Smith’s NW is garnering the most plaudits, or at least that seems to be the case.