Hardy Women by Paula Byrne: brilliant writer of women, very bad husband – review by Rachel Cooke in The Guardian. "How is it, [Byrne] wants to know, that while a female fan could write to the creator of Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead praising him for his 'complete understanding of a woman’s soul', his first wife could only rail at the way he reserved his sympathies exclusively for those females he invented? Drawing on Hardy’s correspondence, including some letters that were, Byrne says, unknown to previous biographers, she sets out in her new book to find answers by looking closely at all the women in his life – and I do mean all of them. Not only are his wives and lovers, his sisters and his mother here. At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.... While Hardy Women is deeply researched and often well-written, it is, unfortunately, one of those books that struggles to rise above its tricksy, completist concept. Chop-chop-chop, we go, through all the women, each chapter devoted to a different one, save for those few that return, by necessity, to a creature we’ve already met. The effect, in narrative terms, is frustratingly stop-start, and (unintentionally, I think) repetitive. ... The biggest problem, however, stems from the fact that the most fascinating period by far of Hardy’s life in terms of his relationships with women is ... those months and years when he was in a complicated and deceitful menage with [his wife] Emma and [his secretary] Florence. Of course it’s sad to see how he used his cousin Tryphena Sparks and a woman called Eliza Nicholls, who arrived, Miss Havisham-like, at Max Gate after Emma’s death in 1912, still in possession of the engagement ring he’d given her 40 years before – and Byrne tells both stories beautifully. But still, the reader waits – and waits – for Florence to appear and then collide with Emma, and you have to get through an awful lot of pages before she does (Hardy Women is long)."
Spent Light by Lara Pawson: the dark side of everyday things – review by Sarah Moss in The Guardian. "At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers... The gas burning under the egg pan reminds her of Zyklon B and the crematoriums of Auschwitz.... [But] these aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. Eventually, inevitably, Pawson turns her gaze to a phone... She cannot recall 'the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock … where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one are raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt'. And then, devastatingly, 'I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused.'... Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose."
On the 60th birthday of Vision On, we celebrate a creative powerhouse that inspired a generation – article by Mark Braxton on the Radio Times website. "Vision On was always a gem in the children's TV schedules – and now it's a diamond, 60 years old on 6th March. Between 1964 and 1976 it entertained children – and let's face it, their parents – with a quickfire and visually exhilarating mixture of comedy, creative ideas, multi-format animations, mime and viewers' artworks.... Input came from far and wide. [Says Vision On cornerstone Clive Doig:] 'We had a little cottage industry of regular contributors: animation artists, film directors who made little visually interesting films, many stop-motion film contributors...' Vision On [fixtures] included comic-strip-style mini-stories involving captioned conversations between Humphrey the Tortoise and a little girl called Susanne; or between The Burbles, invisible creatures who lived in a grandfather clock; the animated unearthings of The Digger on a construction site; and a cartoon cuckoo who was always losing the numbers from its clock.... 'Pat [Keysell] was terrific as the front presenter,' says Clive. 'When I was first assigned to Vision On, she had been there for many years. I think she really enjoyed breaking away from a rather plodding, stultified programme [For the Deaf] into a madcap programme of surreal ideas and visual comedy.'... Keysell assisted with the show's mime sequences, first with Ben Benison and when he left, future Doctor Who star Sylvester McCoy – billed in those days as Sylveste McCoy.... Of course, critical to the success and longevity of Vision On and its spin-offs Take Hart and Hartbeat was the brilliant artist and educator Tony Hart.. 'His type of art was amazing in the fact that he could take any little objects and turn them into great paintings.'... Humour was a big ingredient in Vision On and keeping the gag rate high on a weekly basis was David Cleveland in the gurning, lab-coated guise of The Prof. Week after week his mini masterpieces of surreal comedy were a major highlight and employed all kinds of trick photography."
Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus? – article by Marina Hyde in The Guardian. "Did some randos calling him a 'racist' on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them 'paedophiles'... A supposed free-speech nut suing for libel (not his first rodeo), Laurence brought his counterclaim on the basis that 'I felt that one of the most important things I had in this world was my good name'. Mm-hm. I can’t help feeling that that ship had not just already sailed, but been sunk in the Solent around 300 years before the development of the electric lightbulb.... Let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda.... Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. ... Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey."
The writer's attempts to improve his novel – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Writer (to three engineers, tending respectively to his desk, chair and laptop): Well, if there's nothing wrong with my chair, desk or computer, then why is my novel so terrible?"
A Dirty, Filthy Book by Michael Meyer: sex and sanctimony – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. "Ninety years before the Lady Chatterley trial, the Old Bailey was tying itself in knots trying to decide whether The Fruits of Philosophy was the sort of thing that would corrupt wives and servants. Written in simple, unshowy language by an American physician, Fruits set out the basics of contraception, principally by means of 'the female' self-administering a spermicidal douche post-coitus. The tone was sensible and brisk, and about as far from a turn-on as could be imagined. Still, as far as the British authorities were concerned, the suggestion that married couples might want to have sex for any purpose other than making babies was downright obscene.... Standing in the dock was Annie Besant, a pretty, intelligent, public-spirited clergyman’s wife, the sort of woman whom any gentleman of the press or, indeed, the jury bench was likely to admire. Besant was charged, along with her co-defendant Charles Bradlaugh, with selling The Fruits of Philosophy at the modest cost of six pence, making it easily available to all who needed it. Besant conducted her own defence with extraordinary assurance, calling expert medical witnesses to give heart-rending testimony as to the consequences for working-class families of being unable to control their fertility.... Michael Meyer plays up to all these stereotypes and even adds a comic commentary of his own. Thus, the Victorians enjoyed 'shagging like rabbits' while Besant was 'a badass'. This effortful attempt to sound relevant is unnecessary, though. Besant’s story is quite powerful enough without all the trimmings."
We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review by Joe Moshenska in The Guardian. "When the Nazis rose to power and it became clear that this society could produce not just Kant and Beethoven but Himmler and Kristallnacht, [Arendt] fled to the US. [She] questioned whether the traditions [she] had absorbed, not just of Germany but of European thought stretching back to ancient Greece, could be used to understand the obscenities through which they were living, or were inadequate – even complicit – with them. As Stonebridge shows, what distinguished Arendt was her determination to gather up the fragments of these political and philosophical traditions and to reinvent them. ... Her deepest concerns were with the nature of human beginnings – with the innovations and surprises of which people are capable, and the futures that their acts make possible; with the fact of human plurality – the fundamental variety of our common and fragile life that makes true thought possible; and with the possibility of love, which is for Arendt, as Stonebridge elegantly puts it, 'the infinitely precious apprehension of and pleasure in human otherness… Love is the pre-political condition of us being together in the world in the first place'. Arendt clung on to these key commitments with the opposite of naive idealism. They were the basis of her lifelong exploration of the ways in which nazism and totalitarianism deform and nullify these fundamental capacities, and of the beleaguered but revolutionary possibilities that nonetheless remain. Her very way of being – idiosyncratic and original, while still feeling the shared world itching at her fingertips – embodied these ideals. The pressing relevance of Arendt’s work was suggested when her sprawling magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism, shot up the bestseller lists following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Stonebridge’s book is an interesting generic mixture that itself feels like a sign of the times: it combines biography, critical assessment of Arendt’s legacy, practical handbook for action (six of the 10 chapters begin 'How to…'), and musings on the current geopolitical situation."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the contradictions of colonialism – review by Nandini Das in The Guardian. "Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of [Pennsylvania plant trader John] Bartram and [the Royal Gardens at] Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it, and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling. For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds that changed the English landscape and accelerated modern plant science also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world. And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism. Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.... 'It’s all true, but the opposite is also true', as Sanghera puts it. History is not a balance sheet: sometimes it requires that we hold multiple truths in our mind simultaneously. Nations – and individuals – can do great evil at the same time as doing good. And that’s where it gets complicated: sometimes doing what’s considered evil can lead to good, and vice versa."
Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera: the charge sheet against rule Britannia – review by Colin Grant in The Guardian. "In Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel to Empireland (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to the popularity of Indian restaurants.... His new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an influence.... The book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is 'not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding', he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists. Britain’s genius for propaganda has previously been used to cast its imperial identity as heroic rather than villainous. This has been replicated in the US, where the battle over the curation of history – in particular over alleged fears of the negative impact on children exposed to any text that contains traumatic events – has seen many rightwing commentators talk up the benefits of slavery to the enslaved. Such egregious arguments have not yet found favour in Britain, but they highlight the lure of revisionism. Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. Empireworld makes it more difficult for revisionists ... to return the genie to that bottle."
Christopher Priest – obituary by John Clute in The Guardian. "The novelist Christopher Priest ...became eminent more than once over the nearly 60 years of his active working life. But while he relished success, he displayed a wry reserve about the ambiguities attending these moments in the limelight. In 1983 he was included in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a 20-strong cohort, most of them – such as Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and AN Wilson – significantly younger than Priest, whose career had begun almost two decades earlier, and who had at least 15 books and 50 stories in print by the early 80s. He clearly felt that it was not so much the quality of his work that delayed his 'promotion' to the literary establishment, but his reluctance to deny, when asked, that he wrote science fiction. His large body of work never fitted easily into any mould. Only in recent years has it become widely understood that the sometimes baffling ingenuity and thrust of his fiction has been of a piece, no more detachable into convenient genres than, say, Amis’s or Ishiguro’s tales of the fantastic. Like them, he wove visions of Britain drifting into a post-empire future without secure signposts. Those stories, and the characters he let loose without a paddle, sink and dodge into realities that no longer count. Lacking much in the way of science-fiction gear, even his early work seems to describe the point that we have now arrived at."
Namesake by NS Nuseibeh: the pen and the sword – review by Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. "'Floating in painful limbo, I belong to no one,' writes British-Palestinian doctoral student NS Nuseibeh in her first book of essays. She uses memories, historical research and stories from early Islam to reflect on her identity and on what it means to be a Muslim feminist in these turbulent and sorrowful times. Born in East Jerusalem, Nuseibeh doesn’t fit cliched expectations of a Palestinian Muslim. She has light skin and an American accent, and studied the Qur’an at university, not in a mosque. In moments of doubt and insecurity, she searches for connection with her indomitable ancestor and namesake, Nusayba, a mythic warrior, mother and early convert who fought alongside the prophet Muhammad. Nusayba is an enthralling conduit into her family’s cultural heritage and 'easy for me to imagine, as I sit curled up here on my bed, in a slightly cold room in Oxford, thirteen hundred or so years later: a stout, muscled woman atop a horse, licking sweat from her lips as she strings a bow one-handed'.... Searching and honest, these essays carry the reader from New York dinner parties to seventh-century battlefields to Jerusalem checkpoints and down the alleyways of a shrewd and compassionate mind. As she trails Nusayba, the academic in her recedes and you can hear a girlish heart racing, her belief in her own courage blossoming. This subtext is what makes Namesake a pleasure to read: the shy, people-pleasing scholar behind all that incisive research diving headfirst into old myths as if trying to resurrect her redoubtable foremother. Will she find belonging and a connection to her ancestors? Will she ever return to Gaza or get flagged by Prevent? Will she stop worrying, make peace with overstaying houseguests and English aubergines? Will she be allowed to introduce herself as Arab and feminist without having to reject her Muslim history? At once vulnerable and intellectually rigorous, here is an illuminating and trenchant exploration of Muslim feminism (a term I understand better now, though I still have a lot of arguing left in me). An essential read in the war against lazy stereotypes, cultural annihilation and every form of apartheid."
The software says my student cheated using AI. They say they’re innocent. Who do I believe? – article by Robert Topinka in The Guardian. "When I sat down to mark undergraduate student essays in the spring of 2023, the hype around ChatGPT was already at giddy heights. Like teachers everywhere, I was worried that students would succumb to the temptation to outsource their thinking to the machine. Many universities, including mine, responded by adopting AI detection software, and I soon had my fears confirmed when it provided the following judgment on one of the essays: '100% AI-generated'. Essays are marked anonymously, so my heart dropped when I found out that the first '100% AI-generated' essay I marked belonged to a brilliant, incisive thinker whose essays in the pre-ChatGPT era were consistently excellent, if somewhat formulaic in style.... Policy demands that I refer essays with high AI detection scores for academic misconduct, something that can lead to steep penalties, including expulsion. But my standout student contested the referral, claiming university-approved support software they used for spelling and grammar included limited generative AI capabilities that had been mistaken for ChatGPT.... I granted the appeal. I admit to trusting the human over the machine. But the defence was also convincing, and this particular student had been consistently writing in this style long before ChatGPT came into being. Still, I was making a high-stakes call without reliable evidence. It was a distressing experience for my student, and one that is being repeated across the sector."
Can these seven tips help you become a ‘supercommunicator’? – article by Lauren Mechling in The Guardian. "My weeklong experiment in being one of the 'supercommunicators' [was guided by] bestselling author Charles Duhigg’s zippy psychology cum self-help book of the same name. Inspired by his own chagrin at being a less than sterling conversational partner – with his children, wife and employees at his former workplace – he committed himself to learning how to talk to others in a way that makes them feel heard.... Duhigg’s conversations with neurologists, psychologists and negotiation experts led him to learn that superior conversationalists have a lot in common. They tend to open up and share information about their own experiences and feelings, laugh freely and ask 20 times more questions than the average person.... Mirror their wants and needs.... Laugh your way into their heart.... Use your influence.... Assess what kind of conversation is needed.... Prepare a list of topics to discuss.... Repeat what they're saying.... Pay attention to non-verbal cues."
Five of the best books about grief – article by Sophie Ratcliffe in The Guardian. "Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter... Sad Book by Michael Rosen... You Are Not Alone: A New Way to Grieve by Cariad Lloyd... Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley... Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About this Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross"
Rocking the boat: would your marriage survive being shipwrecked together? – article by Sophie Elmhirst in The Guardian. "Let’s play it as a game. Two-player, ideally lovers.... The set-up is simple. You’re in a boat in the middle of an ocean. You have no radio. Oh, and one of you can’t swim. That’s key. A whale collides with your boat and as it fills with water you salvage a few tins of food and containers of fresh water, a couple of books, some clothes, a small inflatable dinghy and an even smaller life raft. You climb into the raft and watch your boat sink below the waves. And then the game begins. The challenges are initially practical: how do you eat? How do you find water? How do you sleep? Then they’re psychological: what do you do all day? How do you stay hopeful? How do you not go insane? ... There are questions of power to resolve: who’s in charge? Who makes the decisions? Who chooses what you eat or how much water you’re allowed to drink? Towards the end, as in all good games, things turn nicely existential. Do you make it or do you die? How do you die? Who dies first?... The version I’ve written, Maurice and Maralyn, isn’t fictional, but tells the true story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, an English couple who, in 1973, endured nearly four months adrift on a small life raft in the Pacific before they were rescued.... The only thing we know for sure, obviously, is how the game ends, and it’s not with salvation. Ending Maurice and Maralyn’s story with their rescue would be like ending a love story with a wedding. A sentimental misrepresentation: bullshit. No, the game can only end one way, which is death.... You can avoid the emptiness, but sometimes I wonder if it’s better to stare at it, right in the eye. Acknowledge the emptiness and know that you have to keep doing anyway, that you have to live in the knowledge of death without it dictating the terms.... I think that’s how Maralyn played the game. Maurice uncovered the emptiness, bathed in the stuff, almost let it smother him, while she kept going, kept doing. She didn’t feel she had a choice. In fact, she was grateful for the purpose he gave her. Later, an interviewer asked Maralyn how Maurice had helped her. 'I think it was having someone else to think about, rather than think about myself all the time,' she replied. It wasn’t just the doing; it was the thinking, too. She thought, and found meaning, beyond the limits of herself – which is, if you think about it, the ultimate cheat code. Death can’t touch you once you’re no longer supremely invested in yourself. She won." See also 'Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, a Shipwreck, a Love Story by Sophie Elmhirst review – how to keep a marriage afloat' review by Tim Adams in The Guardian.
