Ian McEwan accepted the Jerusalem Prize from Israeli President Shimon Peres and the Guardian reports that he used the ceremony to launch an incisive critique of Israel’s domestic policy, branding it a ‘great injustice’. In fact that’s barely half the story. McEwan was balanced: he unequivocally denigrated the ‘nihilism of the suicide bomber and the nihilism of the extinctionist policies of Israel’. He acknowledged and praised the ‘precious tradition of the democracy of ideas in Israel’ and attacked the captive minds on both sides that are perpetuating ‘a great and self-evident injustice’.
McEwan devoted the rest of his speech to the novel, which he argued:
‘Has become our best and most sensitive means of exploring the freedom of the individual, and such explorations often depict what happens when that freedom is denied.’
The Telegraph reports that a lost short story by Daphne du Maurier has been found. Written in the late twenties and titled The Doll, the story is described as a ‘macabre story of obsession and jealousy’ – du Maurier’s favoured ground; indeed, the central character is even called Rebecca; she wrote her classic novel of that name a decade later.
Du Maurier referred to the lost short story in her autobiography and memoirs, but academics and enthusiasts failed to find a manuscript or printed copy. It has been discovered by Ann Willmore, a du Maurier devotee, in a 1937 compendium of stories that were rejected for publication, The Editor Regrets. The Doll is to be included in a new anthology of du Maurier’s short stories.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Garry Kasparov tells of his longing to play the maverick Grand Master, Bobby Fischer. In fact, the article barely concerns the latest account of the rise and fall of Bobby Fischer; rather it’s about Chess, emotion and psychology. Here’s how Kasparov begins to recount his Odyssey:
‘I dreamed of playing Fischer one day, and we eventually did become competitors after a fashion, though in the history books and not across the chessboard. He left competitive chess in 1975, walking away from the title he coveted so dearly his entire life. Ten more years passed before I took the title from Fischer’s successor, Anatoly Karpov, but rarely did an interviewer miss a chance to bring up Fischer’s name to me. “Would you beat Fischer?” “Would you play Fischer if he came back?” “Do you know where Bobby Fischer is?” Occasionally I felt as though I were playing a one-sided match against a phantasm. Nobody knew where Fischer was, or if he, still the most famous chess player in the world at the time, was out there plotting a comeback. After all, at forty-two in 1985 he was still much younger than two of the players I had just faced in the world championship qualification matches. But thirteen years away from the board is a long time. As for playing him, I suppose I would have liked my chances and I said as much, but how can you play a myth? I had Karpov to worry about, and he was no ghost. Chess had moved on without the great Bobby, even if many in the chess world had not.’
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