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The Guardian, bless it, has a super feature asking a judge from each of the Booker Prize’s 40(!) years to recall their experiences as a member of the panel. It’s a terrific read and well worth your time. (One surprise, to me at least, the amount of love shown JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur).
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What a shower. From Simon Clark’s Taking Liberties blog, comes this unsurprising element of the government’s latest consultation on smoking: “Question 12: Do you believe that more should be done by the Government to reduce exposure to secondhand smoke within private dwellings or in vehicles used primarily for private purposes? If so, what do you
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Joe Biden is good and Conor Friedersdorf is right: “Victories won on style are pyrrhic for political parties, and poison for a nation. Because sooner or later, substance always matters.“ This is true. The Palin Punt is, in some ways, outrageous. In others it’s designed to appeal to a somewhat adolescent view of politics. That’s
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Via Clive Davis, the Washington Post offers a list of five great unfinished novels. As you might expect The Man Without Qualities and The Last Tycoon are among those who make the cut. One that’s missing: the novel that was shaping up to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston. What other novels should
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Sad, really. That was my immediate melancholy reaction to John McCain’s speech to the Republican convention in St Paul. This was not your daddy’s John McCain; heck it weren’t even the John McCain of 2000. McCain, I’m afraid, seemed a wee old man up there and his delivery – never a strong suit – was
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In the comments to the previous post, Toby writes, astutely: As with Churchill, he [McCain] hankers after the Empire he knew in his youth. He feels uneasy about the falloff of his country from former greatness. But he is now closer to the Churchill of 1950 than 1940, and the American people are more in
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Meanwhile, back in Blighty, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke says Gordon Brown is toast and the PM should “stand down with honour”. Just what Labour needed as the conference season looms! Iain Martin’s column in the Telegraph today is an entertaining survey of the current, hapless state of the Labour Party: adrift on the high
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Virginia Postrel recalls visiting the National Cowgirl Museum and seeing an aspect of American history that helps explain Sarah Palin’s appeal: The Cowgirl Museum showcased women of no-nonsense character, pioneer (and pioneering) achievement, physical daring, and unapologetic femininity. Full of inspiring role models, the museum presented a piece of feminist history that gets left out
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Andrew Sullivan concludes his live-blogging of Sarah Palin’s speech with an exasperated sigh: “Reality television has become our politics.” Perhaps. More likely, politics has been a reality TV show since before John Logie Baird invented the damn goggle box. Because, yes, you choose the candidate you like best or the one that has impressed you
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God bless the Daily Mail. How can you resist a story headlined: Are We All Going to Die Next Wednesday? Of course you remember the rule: all headlines written as questions invite – nay, have – the answer “No”. But, admit it, in this instance you might have a look and see what this imminent,
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Andrew, as one would expect, is defending his candidate: It was a great line: “Listening to [Obama] speak, it’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate.” I guess we should thank Matt Scully
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A (Democratic) friend sends me this entertaining scenario: Muscatine, Iowa 2012 Gov. Palin: We are going to change America, change it from higher taxes, higher crime, and a quagmire in Afghanistan. fmr. Gov. Romney: I know how to make change. I’m running on 20 years of a record of change, of commitment to America and conservatism, Gov. Palin
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Somewhere, Mark Penn is having a terrible day. He must feel like leaning out his office window and screaming, “I told you so, you bloody fools! But would you listen? Would you? No, no you bloody well wouldn’t…” Remember the memo he passed around the Clinton campaign on March 19th 2007? You should, because I
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More baby news: Rachida Dati, the 42 year old French Justice Minister, is, like Bristol Palin, pregnant. As Art Goldhammer says, however, they do things differently in France. Dati says she has no intention of revealing the father’s identity and offers this marvellous comment: “I have a very complicated private life, and that’s where I
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One by-product of the Sarah Palin affair is that her speech tonight is vastly more eagerly anticipated than the address John McCain will give on Thursday night. As any Broadway producer can tell you, it’s quite something when the understudy takes top billing from the headline star. That’s not always a good thing. Then again,
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Radley Balko is right. Faced with the prospect of a global financial meltdown (perhaps!) this is the sort of cheery story we need. If this doesn’t restore your faith in the United States of America, what can? State attorneys say John LaVoie should be forever barred from the massage business because he ran a house
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This week’s New Yorker carries a profile of Alec Baldwin. The piece is written by Ian Parker and really, it’s quite splendid. It begins: Alec Baldwin, who stars in “30 Rock,” the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to
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Is it just me, or has David Brooks written a column this morning explaining that John McCain is fundamentally, irredeemably ill-suited to being President of the United States? My worry about [Sarah] Palin is that she shares McCain’s primary weakness — that she has a tendency to substitute a moral philosophy for a political philosophy.
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In the light of all the Sarah Palin entertainment, Matt Yglesias asks a good question: how should you cook moose anyway? He links to some recipes (Moose nose in jelly??) some of which confirm my suspicion that you should treat moose as though it were venison or, even, at a pinch, wild boar. Slow and
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So the Republican convention gets back on track tonight though not quite as initially planned. George W Bush for instance will address the convention via satellite, not in person. One thing that has changed since 2004: back then it was the GOP convention that had star quality. In addition to the President, John McCain, Rudy