Misunderstanding Orwell
‘Nineteen-Eighty Four’ was first published sixty-six years ago today. Some people seemed to think that Big Brother was based on the unlikely figure of Clement Attlee.
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If at first you don’t succeed …
Ingeborg Rapoport was a recent medical graduate when she finished her doctoral thesis on diphtheria in Hamburg in 1938. But she was not allowed to submit it as her mother was of Jewish origin.
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Saul Bellow Brought To Book
Saul Bellow was not the first, but he was one of the earlier and most dominant of the Jewish writers who played such a big part in 20th-century American literature.
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Peter Gay: 1923 – 2015
Peter Gay, who fled Berlin with his family as a schoolboy, settling in the United States, was one of the most eminent historians of the Enlightenment. He was also a biographer of Freud and wrote other books on modern German and Austrian history.
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Slugging It Out
A new group, Historians for Britain, argues that Britain’s ‘special’ historical path means it should tell the EU to bog off. A rival group, Historians for History, argues that there is no such special path. There will be blood.
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Labour’s Scottish Woes
This week’s UK election is one of the most uncertain for decades. But one thing is sure: Labour will do disastrously in Scotland. And the likelihood is that that situation will persist until such time as the Scottish party can effectively assert its independence from the English one.
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Cheap and Cheerful
George Orwell thought that paperbacks were a good idea, particularly for the reader. But he also thought publishers and booksellers should combine to suppress them.
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Trollope and Ireland: A Talk
John McCourt, Joycean scholar and chronicler of the Trieste years, will be talking about Anthony Trollope’s Irish novels in Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street on Sunday, April 19th.
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Eduardo Galeano: 1940-2015
The Uruguayan writer, journalist and political essayist, who had died aged 74, was an inspirational figure for generations of the Latin American left.
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Günter Grass: 1927-2015
The Nobel prizewinner was the best-known German writer internationally and a major figure in both literature and political controversy over half a century.