Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road

Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.
‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his [...]

Some posts on happiness

A little bit of a round-up from my reading morning from book blogs and most things I’ve come across, happily, have been on, well, happiness…

Without Bounds on the dificulty of capturing happiness in literature.
Lizzie Siddal on two novellas about happiness, and her own take on what constitutes happiness (a blue sky – looking out of [...]

Writing and the flowering of imagination

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, [...]

Empathy and our homeless project

I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was [...]

Ian Jack on tense and cherries

I have just had porridge for breakfast. I mixed it with a banana (Dominican Republic), a Clementine (Spain), some organic raisins (Kenya) and some almonds (also Spain). I sprinkled on some linseed (Canada) and some cinnamon (unspecified within the EU). I have no way of knowing where the oats came from, but as the bag [...]

Wolf Hall and death in stone

Early on in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, set in the 1500s and retelling the stories of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, the Cardinal imagines the remembrance of his death.
The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian’s last end, has had his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His corpse [...]