From our UK edition
34 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast I am joined by Lucy Mangan, author of Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. She tells me what teenagers did before they had Young Adult books to read, the bizarre demise of the author of Goodnight Moon, and the wisdom of forsaking the busy world for an armchair and a good book.
From our UK edition
34 min listen
This week: should the assisted dying bill be killed off?Six months after Kim Leadbeater MP launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. They say the most basic aspects of the bill – having gone through its committee stage – do not hold up to scrutiny. Dan Hitchens agrees, writing in the magazine this week that ‘it’s hard to summarise the committee’s proceedings except with a kind of Homeric catalogue of rejected amendments’ accompanied by a ‘series of disconcerting public statements’. With a third reading vote approaching, what could it tell us about the country we live in?
From our UK edition
The great thing about Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women is that it has something for everyone: stay-at-home types have the oldest of the March sisters, Meg, who struggles to reconcile her love of ease with both her responsibilities and the family’s genteel poverty (and does at least manage to have one night of fun at the Moffatts’ party, sipping their champagne with one hand and sporting her single good glove on the other, before settling down with a nice husband and even better linen cupboard); cool-slash-mean girls have Amy, who wrestles with vanity — not hugely successfully IMHO (Amy would be a demon with textspeak and indeed probably the first social media star from Massachusetts); romantics have Beth and her chronic timidity and pulmonary weakness; and t.
From our UK edition
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in a squalid, dilapidated house in a Sussex seaside town. It contains her mother Ange, her aunt Di, her grandmother, an unspecified number of siblings and a variety of temporary inhabitants who joined the Zion-seeking cult that evolved around Ange and Di. There are also a few longer-lasting denizens, such as Uncle David (first encountered unconscious on the sitting room floor), the sinister Woman Upstairs, and Poor Sue, who later seems to come to some kind of Poor End.
From our UK edition
Are writers born or made? The answer, by the end of Love from Boy — a selection of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother drawn from the 40 years of correspondence they kept up, lovingly edited and deftly commented upon by his biographer Donald Sturrock — is surely that they are both. Even as a 12-year-old, regaling her with tales of derring-do at Repton, the economy and vivid turn of phrase are evident that would characterise both his grand guignol short stories for adults and the children’s books for which he eventually became both loved and lauded. Out ice-skating, ‘I had eight chaps pulling me with a long rope at a terrific lick and I sat down in the middle of it. My bottom is all blue now.
