Books features
Jasper Rees
When the sun rises on the Welsh Language and Heritage Centre, I step out into crisp morning air and a sort of Welsh plaza, a large walled lawn flanked on two sides by cottages. In all directions but one there is a sense of enclosure, rocky slopes heaving upwards. Nant Gwrtheyrn has been scooped out of the side of a mountain as if by giants. Nowhere in the country are peaks in such towering proximity to the sea. To the south-west there’s a long view along coastal cliffs as they turn a stern profile to the Irish Sea (pictured below). I wander down to a swanky new building, all glass gleam and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
George Borrow, embarking on the journey which would become the classic Victorian travel book Wild Wales (1862), sped towards the country by train in, he reports, a melancholy frame of mind “till looking from a window I caught sight of a long line of hills, which I guessed to be the Welsh hills, as indeed they proved, which sight causing me to remember that I was bound for Wales, the land of the bard, made me cast all gloomy thoughts aside and glow with all the Welsh enthusiasm with which I glowed when I first started in the direction of Wales.”Borrow is the only notable author of a travel Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s perhaps best to start this review by stating that I miss Horrid Henry's target demographic by about, ooh, a decade or three. But it’s also right and proper to say that while I wouldn’t recommend it for grown-ups, those youngsters whose opinions I canvassed after the screening I attended gave it a huge thumbs-up.It’s not difficult to see why, as there are plenty of fart and bogey gags (the latter really quite disgusting when viewed in 3D) and adults are the butt of all the jokes. Theo Stevenson as the titular character is lovely, too (and not at all horrid, but that’s the story’s weakness Read more ...
andy.kershaw
I walked in to find my new Radio 1 producer standing on our secretary’s desk – she was on the phone – wearing a sombrero, a huge rubber ear, and playing the trumpet. Around him, in the third floor typing pool of the Nation’s Favourite – unable, given the din of The Peanut Vendor, to mew to one another comparisons of train journeys to and from East Croydon – secretaries were varnishing their nails or even typing programme running orders.Down the corridor in our office – Room 318 of Egton House, a hideous 1960s office block, next door to Broadcasting House, and the home of Radio 1 – the world’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sarah Waters’s highly praised novels have marched from the page to the screen with regimental regularity and no apparent sacrifice in quality. Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, with their big Victorian brushstrokes, were built for television no less than Dickens is. With The Night Watch, adapted last night, her subject was still the love that dare not speak its name. But two things were different. This time Waters’s sweeping saga was compressed into a single film. And it was brought forward in time to the Blitz, when a modern lady’s drawers could be whipped off in a flash.As usual with Read more ...
fisun.guner
Best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968 and whose centenary is celebrated this year, was also an artist, an illustrator and a poet. As well as illustrating his own fiction (images 5-9), some of his finest drawings were for books by other authors. For grotesque satiric humour and Gothic sensibility he found a perfect match in Dickens, as his rather creepy illustrations for Bleak House beautifully attest.
For Carroll's Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, he imagined a contemporary Alice who seemed younger and much livelier than Tenniel's prim Victorian miss ( Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A village green, a little big top - and War and Peace. Sometimes large ambitions come in the smallest packages, and one can only take one’s hat off to the ambitious, pocket-sized Giffords Circus for setting out to squish Tolstoy’s four-volume epic of love and internecine war into a very small sawdust ring, with horses, jugglers, aerialists, clowns and gymnasts. And as you park your car on the green and wander over under the quiet afternoon sky to the cute white tent where a rackety little brass band is parping and blaring from inside (and check out the “War and Pizza” trailer for the interval Read more ...
susan.whitall
Because Little Willie John died a lonely death in a Washington state prison cell in 1968, much of the baby boom generation grew up only half-knowing who he was. You’d occasionally hear that effervescent but distant voice on the radio, buried by overdubbed strings on the 1960 pop hit “Sleep”. Or maybe you’d hear a snippet of his lovestruck tenor on the torchy 1958 ballad “Talk to Me, Talk to Me”, played as an oldie on the radio. Even by the early Sixties, less than a decade after he hit big as a teenager in 1955 with the R'n'B classic “All Around the World”, Willie’s status as one of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its life and death. They plant, grow, overgrow, eat, overeat; they tell themselves the earth will always be fruitful, but they’re mistaken. In the end two of the angels become Adam and Eve and walk off hand in hand into a ruined landscape lit by the rising sun. Then Luke Bedford sets it all to music.Glyn Maxwell’s last opera libretto, as far as I know Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The argument in Terry Pratchett's BBC Two documentary Choosing to Die boiled down to the sanctity of life versus the quality of life. Pratchett's own reasoning, that he has Alzheimer's disease and would prefer to choose the manner and timing of his own death before he becomes incapable of making that decision, is eminently logical.The subjects of his film, multiple sclerosis sufferer Andrew Colgan and Peter Smedley, who has motor neuron disease, had opted to end their lives at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich rather than endure the inevitable progression of their illnesses. You might not have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to set up a tent selling Alfred Wainwright's fell-walking guides and Kendal Mint Cake. But where else can you find such a high density of starry names and media taste-makers in a soggy field on the Welsh border?Even more remarkable is that you can't get a signal on an O2 mobile phone for miles, and the sense of entering a mysterious dimension where Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Earlier this week, in my review of Shelby Lynne, I suggested that the record industry’s one-way ticket on a fast train to oblivion is, at least, proving to be the mother of invention. Everyone has to work a little harder and smarter for our attention, a point which David Ford’s latest tour, which ends tonight in a sold-out show in Birmingham, makes emphatically: part book reading, part solo concert, part intimate natter, part request show, it might have seemed desperate if it hadn’t been so engaging.Ford has just published his first book, I Choose This: How to Nearly Make it in the Music Read more ...