Culture

Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use, Did after him the World seduce: And from the fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure, Where Nature was most plain and pure. He first enclos'd within the Gardens square A dead and standing pool of Air: And a more luscious Earth for them did knead, Which stupifi'd them while it fed. The Pink grew then as double as his Mind; The nutriment did change the kind. With strange perfumes he did the Roses taint. And Flow'rs themselves were taught to paint. [...] ‘Tis all enforc'd; the Fountain and the Grot; While the sweet Fields do lye forgot: Where willing Nature does to all dispence A wild and fragrant Innocence: And Fauns and Faryes do the Meadows till, More by their presence then their skill.

Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor's honour at St. Stephen's Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate portrait of Michelle Obama, who has begun ‘pushing back’ against ‘an independent journalistic project’.   According to Kantor, the First Lady is a strong personality, quick to rebuke others but loath to take criticism herself.

Jaipur - In a dramatic end to the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, four writers rallied in support of Salman Rushdie by reading from The Satanic Verses. The book has been banned in India since 1988. As a result, a warrant was issued for the festival organizers; arrests which, at time of writing, have not been resolved.   In a statement made earlier today, Rushdie said he would not travel to Jaipur as planned because of intelligence reports that paid assassins were being sent from Mumbai to kill him. The author wrote on Twitter, "Very sad not to be at jaipur. I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to 'eliminate' me. Will do video link instead. Damn." [sic] At a talk scheduled for 5.

Publishers' eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come in the form of ‘video, documents, apps, books, shared syllabus and assignments', and are priced at $14.99 or less. The major innovation is a new software programme, iBooks Author, which will allow teachers to create or modify textbooks and teaching materials to their own specifications.

Fresh from sixty radio and TV appearances in 2011 alone, the popular historian and constitutional expert, Kate Williams, is on Shelf Life this week. She tells us about her religious fervours under the covers and what's worse than finding Mein Kampf on someone's bookshelf. Her first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is out tomorrow. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and H.B. Morse’s 1920s work The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China — my next novel is about China in the nineteenth century. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Bible. I experienced an intensely religious phase when I was younger.

The Guardian reports on a fascinating story from across the Atlantic, where an imprint of Penguin USA has reprinted Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. The book is a based on a copy of the Gospels kept by the third President of the United States between 1803 and 1820, from which he expunged those passages which he could not accept. It would appear, at first glance, that Jefferson placed moral philosophy above the miraculous. He called the book ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth’, and redacted the supernatural elements of Christ’s life from his volume. Gone are the virgin birth, the resurrection and the ascension.

What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say "pretends" because obviously the whole thing is a sustained exercise in hilarious, spot-on pastiche of just how shrill, absurd and ludicrous the liberal-left can be when it tries too hard to be clever.