Shakespeare Basics for Grown-ups comes with the subtitle: Everything You Need to Know about the Bard. That sounds rich, but the authors E Foley and B Coates deliver. Concise, comprehensive, it’s a great briefing on the Bard. [Read more…] about Shakespeare Basics for Grown-ups
The Globe Guide to Shakespeare
Lavishly illustrated, The Globe Guide to Shakespeare is a joy to behold and a pleasure to read. Written by Andrew Dickson, with contributions by Joe Staines, this isn’t a musty, fusty academic treatise thick with jargon. As the authors say in the introduction, “Above all, this isn’t intended to be a textbook, and we hope it’s fun to read: our ambition throughout has been to demystify Shakespeare, to show there are interesting ways of thinking about his works without saturating them in academic jargon.” [Read more…] about The Globe Guide to Shakespeare
Pop music and hit parades
The first regular UK singles chart was published on this day, November 14, in 1952 by the New Musical Express, reminds the website On This Day. Someone has duly posted that on Twitter including even a scanned copy of the newspaper clipping “announcing the first record hit parade”. Yes, that’s what we called weekly lists of bestselling pop music records — “hit parades”. [Read more…] about Pop music and hit parades
Tim Berners-Lee and his World Wide Web
Google tweeted today: “27 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau published their proposal for a little something called the ‘WorldWideWeb’.” That was the first web browser. [Read more…] about Tim Berners-Lee and his World Wide Web
Orwell: Why I Write, BBC, and Reflections on Gandhi
Anyone who likes to write will probably agree with some of the things George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950) has to say on why we write. In his essay, Why I Write, which appeared in 1946, four years before he died at the age of 46, Orwell wrote: [Read more…] about Orwell: Why I Write, BBC, and Reflections on Gandhi
RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days
RK Narayan enjoyed writing short stories more than novels. He said so in the introduction to his collection of short stories, Malgudi Days.
First published in Penguin Books in 1984, Malgudi Days includes selections from his earlier collections, An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947) and Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956 ), as well as stories that had appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Playboy and Antaeus. [Read more…] about RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days