Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral home and Bechdel’s dawning realisation of her own lesbianism. The comic book does not immediately suggest itself as the ideal format for material of such
This is a big juicy slab of a book, as thrilling and nourishing as a Victorian three-parter. It resembles its forebears thematically, too. It asks a straightforward question: how does one know how to do the right thing when there is no moral foundation for our actions? Where the Victorians had a forthright Christianity, modern
The location of Philida is a Cape farm which used to be named Zandvliet and is now the celebrated vineyard Solms Delta, owned jointly by Richard Astor and the eminent neuropsychologist Mark Solms. It was Solms who brought to André Brink the story on which the veteran South African novelist bases his 21st work of
Ten years ago a cartoon appeared in the Independent showing the New World Order — Bush and Blair peering at a distorted global map with only one entry for South America: over Colombia was written ‘Coke-snorting bolshie gorillas’. Back then the Farc guerrillas were on the edge of the capital Bogotá, the country had the
Caroline Norton seems an unlikely pioneer of women’s rights. Born in 1808, the granddaughter of the playwright Sheridan, she was a black-eyed beauty, a sharp-tongued socialite with a gift for writing. She matters today because she quarrelled with her husband and refused to put up and shut up. That quarrel is the subject of Diane
Book-collecting fraternities are far from uncommon, but none of them is the equal of their British progenitor, the Roxburghe Club, either in age or exclusivity. This June the members celebrated its bicentenary, apparently in due style. At the inaugural dinner in 1812, 18 book-collectors, chaired by the Lord Spencer of the day, gathered to celebrate
In October 1810, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist substantially rewrote a review submitted to a publication he edited, the Berliner Abendblätter. Indeed, as few editors would dare — even in those days — he transformed its tone from critical to positive. The subject was a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, ‘The Monk by
The Edinburgh Fringe is a place of youthful hopes, naive dreams and occasional flashes of genuine inspiration. Usually these turn out to be very much flashes in the pan. But not so last Friday night’s ‘story slam’ at the Southall: a contest of storytelling between writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells divided into two teams, representing their
‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can
