The councillor on sudden fame and dealing with difficult people, from ‘Alan’s iPad’ to her own motherJackie Weaver, 63, is the engagingly improbable internet star who found herself on a fast track to fame when a Zoom meeting of the Handforth parish cou…
Mary Beard: ‘If we want to understand the pandemic, we need the arts’
The Cambridge classicist on owning her TV image, dealing with internet trolls, and why her new book on Roman emperors sheds light on our preoccupation with statuesIn her new book, Twelve Caesars, Mary Beard touches enticingly on the life of Elagabalus,…
Miriam Margolyes: ‘Writing my memoir was terrifying. It’s quite revealing’
Gleefully outspoken and bursting with hilarious anecdotes, Miriam Margolyes is gloriously larger than life. As her memoir is published, she tells Eva Wiseman about settling scores, her one regret and why for her nothing is tabooMoney and sex and religi…
Anthony Doerr: ‘Rather than write what I know, I write what I want to know’
The Pulitzer winner on why his new novel is partly set in medieval Constantinople, the Netflix adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See and his childhood love of the Narnia booksAnthony Doerr, 47, is the author of six books, including All the Light We…
Nadine Dorries should write what she likes. And I’ll read what I like | Alex Clark
High brow, low brow – for heaven’s sake, just pick up a bookIn the latest tedious round of the culture war, I did not expect to be taking a position on the books of the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, whose defenders point to her being a prolifi…
On my radar: Roy Williams’s cultural highlights
The renowned playwright on David Morrissey’s acting podcast, the joy of Marvel movies and the musician he listens to every dayRoy Williams was born in London in 1968 and raised in Notting Hill. He studied writing at Rose Bruford college and his plays i…
‘A feeling of deja vu’: author Sergio Ramírez on ex-comrade Ortega and Nicaraguan history repeating
The country’s greatest living writer feels ‘surprised, bewildered and assaulted’ after the president issued a warrant for his arrest and seized copies of his new novel about the 2018 uprisingSergio Ramírez, Nicaragua’s best-known living writer, hero of…
“you are asked to believe them. But I am an unreliable narrator.”
“Impairment phenomenology is different from other kinds of phenomenology in that it does not assume a subject in command of their own faculties.” Scholar Jonathan Sterne has written a forthcoming book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of…
How do you like them books?
eBooks vs Printed Books: Which are better?
The history of the book starts with the development of writing, paper and printing.
Now there’s an ongoing debate over which is better – e-books or paper books. 1. Experience:
Ebooks Are an Abomination
How …
Amazon Gives Kindle E-Readers a Rare User Interface Overhaul
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon’s Kindle e-readers get new software updates regularly, and they’re mostly of the nondescript, invisible “performance improvements and bug fixes” variety. But the most recent operating system…