More than two decades on, the passion that ignited Niffenegger’s debut has all but evaporated from this confused follow-up
I run a reading workshop which begins with a little shelf assessment. Participants bring a stack of books that have shaped who they are: childhood treasures; new revelations; comfort reads. Books they once cherished but have now outgrown. The usual suspect in that category is Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. Once smitten, readers now find that time-warped romance cruel. What felt like destiny now feels like a cage. As they explain, I’m always struck by the same thought: Wasn’t it always cruel? Wasn’t that the point?
Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire are a couple caught in a causal loop. The irresolvable question is where that loop starts: does a bright young art student fall in love with a junior librarian, or does a time-travelling man groom a child to become his future wife? If the answer is both – and it has to be – what are we to make of their marriage? Can you truly choose someone if you believe the choice is already made?
A biographer’s affecting account of prominent critics of Zionism from Hannah Arendt to Nan Goldin
“Everyone in America – at least as far as I knew – was a Zionist,” recalls Benjamin Moser, “especially but not only if you were Jewish.” A Pulitzer-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, he remembers being brought up short in his 20s, when a friend described Israel as “a bunch of foreigners who had no business in the Middle East” and Zionism as a “terrible mistake”. Moser, who recently turned 50, admits: “I was not even aware that Zionism was controversial.” The shift in perspective culminated in a visit to the occupied territories in 2016, during which he found “the reality of the occupation of Palestine … deranging”.
His new book includes 12 portraits of Jewish figures who have opposed Zionism, a movement formed in the late 19th century to advocate for the creation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. It is contentious to oppose Zionism today, but Moser wants contemporary Jewish activists to “feel less alone” by showing that debates about Zionism were once mainstream in Jewish communal life. While around 90% of American Jews now support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (although fewer identify as Zionists), fewer than 1% belonged to the largest American Zionist organisation in 1914. The first character study is of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, who thought that Judaism offered a vision of a world beyond the devastating nationalism of the first world war. The book closes with a moving account of the photographer Nan Goldin, who spoke out, at considerable cost, as the assault on Gaza began in 2023 following the October 7th attacks.
He gave Jimi Hendrix his gear, freaked out Frank Sinatra, inspired Norman Mailer – and tried to topple the American war machine. As a documentary about his band the Fugs comes out, the 87-year-old gives a rare interview
“Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, ‘If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn’t be here,’” Ed Sanders tells me over a video call, savouring the menace in that sentence.
Sanders is an American maverick; a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author whose greatest hit remains his bestselling 1971 book The Family, in which he chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Manson and his followers. Sanders was well placed to report on crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture – though he very much espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising, rather than Manson’s apocalyptic worldview.
The Seinfeld creator went from luckless standup to multi-millionaire – but what’s his secret?
Larry David agreed to this authorised biography with a five-word email: “Oh Jesus. If we must.” As Blake J Harris tells it, the comedy writer has always been adept at finding reasons not to do something, or to stop doing it, even when there’s nothing to fall back on. As a peppery standup in 1970s New York, David was notorious for storming off stage if the audience displeased him. He walked out of his first TV job, on the Saturday Night Live clone Fridays, because “I stunk.” He twice quit Seinfeld, the sitcom he co-created in 1989, over meddling by NBC executives and fantasised about the network giving him an excuse to leave for good. In 1992, just before it became the biggest show in America, he told friends, “Honestly, I would rather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld. It would be peaceful. Nobody would make me write anything.” He was only half joking.
David’s career proves that it is in fact possible to be immensely, groundbreakingly successful without ever displaying great ambition. Growing up in Brooklyn amid a boisterous extended family, Lawrence Gene David loved baseball and tall tales but, oddly, not making people laugh. “I can’t recall him ever saying a funny thing,” remembers his older brother Ken. After a spell in the army reserve, he drifted through low-effort jobs – limo driver, bra salesman – and dropped out of acting school, partly because his classmate Jeff Goldblum showed him what a real actor looked like. “Most of the time I was just waiting for other people to stop talking so that I could start talking,” he admits.
In the face of terrible crises, it can feel right to shock people into action. But what if that has the opposite effect?
These days, it’s easy to succumb to hopelessness. Whether you’re thinking about the climate crisis, the prospect of AI apocalypse, war or political turmoil, the list of challenges facing humanity can seem insurmountable.
It certainly feels unprecedented, and much of it may be. The sense of impending doom, on the other hand, is nothing new. And what we have learned from the past is that doomerism can lead to paralysis. If everyone freezes, then nothing changes – but if we want to have a chance of mitigating some of the threats I’ve mentioned then action is what’s required.
Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago
A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.
Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.
Critics mock it as raunchy trash – but this enchanting genre is much older, and wilder, than you might imagine
There’s a popular genre, filled with beautiful, human-sized fairies having sex with humans (often quite violent sex, but the people reading it seem to enjoy it). Word is that it’s badly written and unashamedly escapist – all golden, glittering palaces, wild adventure and, of course, gorgeous fairies. It’s certainly popular – plenty of the stories have been translated into numerous languages, spreading across continents. Serious commentators are sure it spells bad news: at best, it’s just a load of trash; at worst, it’s actively leading people astray. Most damningly of all, women produce and consume it. Welcome to the 12th century, where fairy romance is all the rage. Sound familiar?
The romantasy that fills our shelves and bestseller lists – from Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses to Callie Hart’s Quicksilver – is not a new genre, but part of a centuries-old heritage. You only need to look at the medieval predecessors of the modern romantasy novel to understand why it’s enjoyed by millions and why, even after hundreds of years, fairy romance has such power over us – and why there are still those who want to diminish and dismiss it.
Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them.
By eight, children’s interests and skills are taking shape. They’re more confident readers, more strategic thinkers and curious about how things work. And while they think they’re extremely grown up, eight-year-olds still need plenty of time to play for their overall wellbeing.
A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories
“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?
A girl called Àìná was captured by an African king and later taken to England to become Sarah Forbes Bonetta, protege of the imperial monarch
When she was seven years old, Bayo Randle’s great-great-grandmother Sarah Forbes Bonetta was presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle as a “diplomatic gift” from an African king.
Victoria would go on to pay for Bonetta’s education, approve her marriage to one of west Africa’s wealthiest men, and become godmother to her eldest daughter.
Tweet by Sarah Helm, wife of national security adviser Jonathan Powell, ‘does not meet criminal threshold’
No further action will be taken against Sarah Helm, the wife of the prime minister’s national security adviser, after she was accused of supporting the banned protest group Palestine Action.
Chilean-American author awarded Premio Planeta for sequel to her 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits
The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende has won Spain’s €1m (£843,000) Premio Planeta, one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, under a pseudonym, with a sequel to her celebrated debut novel, The House of the Spirits.
Allende, 84, won the 75th edition of the award on Thursday with La hora antes del alba, which returns to the characters of her 1982 novel, a multigenerational family saga set against political upheaval in a country inspired by Chile.
The author talks about her nomadic childhood, being targeted by the Turkish government and overcoming depression to write her latest novel
For a long time Elif Shafak was referred to as Turkey’s “most widely read female author”. Today, she is surely simply its best loved. Orhan Pamuk may have won the Nobel prize in literature, but it is Shafak whose novels are fervently passed among readers. There Are Rivers in the Sky, which follows a single raindrop from ancient Nineveh to the River Tigris in 2018, was one of the UK’s bestselling literary novels last year. The Island of Missing Trees, a love story set in post-colonial Cyprus and contemporary London, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize in 2022, and 10 Minutes 38 seconds in This Strange World, narrated by a murdered sex worker in Istanbul, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2019. Last December she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature. It would be tempting to say she is on a roll, but Shafak’s reputation and readership have been steadily growing for more than 20 years and spanning as many books, of which 14 are novels.
In a 2017 Ted Talk, which has been viewed more than 6.4m times, she describes herself as an Istanbulite, “a European by birth and by choice” and a Londoner for many years. “I like to think of myself as a global soul, as a world citizen, a nomad and an itinerant storyteller.” Her novels sweep confidently across centuries and continents, taking in politics, history, feminism and ecology, typically with a dash of magic realism or mysticism.
The Booker-wining author of Possession was known for her voracious research. Now, 68 boxes of her notebooks, letters and diaries acquired by the British Library reveal how she assembled the raw material of her fiction
At 20, Antonia Susan Byatt was not yet sure she could write. “Do I take myself seriously as a writer?” she asked herself in her diary in September 1956. “No, I think not.”
The young Byatt – who would go on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, best known for her 1990 novel Possession: A Romance – was troubled by the possibility that her mind might not be equal to her ambitions. Yet her determination was already evident. On her 20th birthday, she wrote: “Today, I know I can do anything. But not yet.”
For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible, the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam.
Aditya’s suggested reading:
To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair.
For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books.
To learn more about what’s become of the British right, there’s a column by me for the Guardian.
Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshal a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch.
For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper examines how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.
And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, read this paper based on data from the Bank of England.
York Theatre Royal Atwood’s adaptation of her own novella is revived with Amelia Bullmore as a wry Penelope but it’s the eight-strong chorus who pull the story’s threads
After a summer of Odysseus hogging the spotlight thanks to Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster take on Homer, it’s time for the women to have their say. The Penelopiad is, as its title declares, the story of Odysseus’s famously faithful wife. But in Margaret Atwood’s play, adapted for the stage from her own novella, it is also Penelope’s brutally slain maids whose perspective is reclaimed. If Penelope’s voice has been sidelined, theirs have been silenced altogether.
The backdrop for this revisionist storytelling is hades. In Sara Perks’s minimal design, it’s a sterile, featureless place, deliberately drained of the passion and mess of life. Thick, blood-red ropes suggest the strands – literal and narrative – woven by Penelope and the cords used to hang the maids. These wronged figures form a chorus, acting out episodes from Penelope’s life as well as interrupting with their own bitter take on events. We hear of Penelope and Odysseus’s marriage, his departure to Troy, and the long, long years that followed.
David Tennant wows in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing prison drama, and the Dublin band are back with a beguiling fifth album. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews
In between talks on geopolitical doom, one woman says I put her off journalism, while another thanks me for doing the same for her son
I’m at a literary festival in Greece, standing by some sort of colonnade, drink in hand, fulfilling my role as a non-luminary. Ahead of me, hands are being shaken and warm words exchanged. The sun has just set, and there is a faint glow coming off various luminaries.
“Why are you just standing there?” my wife says, coming up behind me.
Author Sarah Helm, married to Jonathan Powell, wrote to back novelist Sally Rooney’s support of proscribed direct action group
The UK’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, is under pressure to distance himself from a comment made by his wife, the award-winning writer Sarah Helm, in support of Palestine Action.
The post was made in defence of the critically acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who said she had been forced to pull her books from shelves in the UK after pledging proceeds from their sales to Palestine Action.
He may have been eclipsed by the more progressive Paddington of late, but AA Milne’s creation is not just a Silly Old Bear
“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred,” Christopher Robin implores his bear in the final chapter of AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. This week Winnie-the-Pooh himself turned 100, and he certainly hasn’t been forgotten. Birthday celebrations have included a week of special programmes, introduced by the queen, on Radio 4; a collection of Royal Mail stamps; and a Google doodle.
Not bad for “a bear of very little brain” who appeared in four slim books. Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by EH Shepard, was published on 14 October 1926 and had sold 150,000 copies in the US by the end of the year.
Two obsessive artists team up to achieve their dreams, but then their aspirations diverge
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.
Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.
One, Women in Red, started in October 2014. At that point, only 15.53% of biographies on the encyclopedia were of women. As of October 2026, that has risen to 20.42%, in part thanks to the many volunteers who spend their spare time searching for reliable sources to draw on. The Women in Red project currently publishes an average of 1,500 new biographies every month.
Android was designed for phones, but that hasn't stopped Google from trying to adapt the OS and its apps to larger machines over the years. Googlebooks are just the latest attempt after tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables induced little change in how people interact with Android software. These new Android-powered laptops are designed to pick up where the web-focused ChromeOS left off, offering premium hardware and native support for Android apps.
Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.
For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.
The People's Bookshelf in the atrium of the National Library of Latvia (NLL) is one of the central design elements of the building. The Bookshelf stores books donated to the Library and currently is home to almost 8 000 books in 50 languages from all over the world. Everyone is asked to donate a book – of special importance to themselves – to the NLL, also writing a message or personal story relating to the book on its title page.
Not every great novel makes a great movie, and sometimes the opposite is true. But regardless of the source text, or how beloved characters are treated, there is more than one way to write a successful adaptation
It is always fun to join in a craze, like a Victorian going mad for penny farthings. Which is probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey this summer, buying my ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else. This year’s other divisive adaptation, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, had the world and his wife arguing about it before they had even watched the film. No doubt the makers of the recent Sense and Sensibility movie were also hoping for lots of people to go and see it to discover whether they hated it.
After all, very few of us leave the cinema saying: “That’s exactly how I pictured it in my head.” Or even less likely: “That was better than the book.” We’re more likely to shake our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably cast somebody with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character, as with last year’s Thursday Murder Club debacle.
The Heights by Ian Rankin; The Mortons by Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier; Murder Most Cryptic by Alys Cummings; The Deadly Inheritance of Everest Macdonald by AJ West; Inheritance by Gillian Slovo
The Heights by Ian Rankin (Orion, £25) Luxury tower blocks, those potent symbols of hyper-gentrification, the increasing wealth gap and the displacement of existing communities, are a gift to novelists. Rankin’s first standalone thriller in almost two decades centres on The Heights, 18 storeys high and facing London’s Hyde Park, where DS Gillian Gish is investigating the suspicious death of night-shift security guard Dwayne Hogarth. The high-net-worth individuals who live there, including a young singer, a gangster’s wife, a man who “made a mint in post-glasnost Russia” and the daughter of a very well-connected Zimbabwean, are either uncontactable or tight-lipped, and it soon becomes clear that the developer, despite his bravado, is in financial trouble. Everyone, it appears, has something to hide – and then a second corpse is discovered. Rankin is a superb storyteller, and this is well up to his usual high standard, while DS Gish – less complex, but considerably more relatable than John Rebus – is worthy of her own series.
The Mortons by Scott Westerfeld & Justine Larbalestier (Viking, £18.99)
There are shades of both The Sopranos and Wednesday Addams in this tale of a powerful old American family whose trade is murder, blackmail and financial fraud. As the Mortons’ great hope, Jessica, puts it, “Give your child a strong hand, a sharp knife, and a big family, then teach them loyalty without care.” The children are given pet rabbits on which to prove their lack of compassion; the family are as ruthless with their own as with everyone else, their graveyard being full of youngsters who failed to make the grade. Jessica, who achieved her first kill aged 20, looks set to take on the murderous mantle, but a summer internship leads to a train of events that culminate in the discovery of a conscience. The Mortons is vivid and exciting, with a nice vein of mordant humour, but there’s a lot of world-building to get through, some of it lacking in internal logic; it’s hard to keep track of the many characters, and the violence towards innocent people and animals may leave some readers feeling queasy.
The American author on being inspired by Kurt Vonnegut, coming late to Jane Austen, and the brilliance of Robert Penn Warren
My earliest reading memory
I remember learning to read with dull stories about Jane going up a hill, but my earliest thrilling reading memories are of series like The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. In the highly gendered reading days of the 1980s, I knew those books were for girls, but I devoured them.
My favourite book growing up
Besides the girls of The Baby-Sitters Club, I loved books about survival and perseverance, especially Gary Paulsen’s The Island, in which a boy discovers a secluded island and ventures there to learn about the natural world.
The engaging TV doctor dismantles the spurious science behind modern day snake oils, from collagen to turmeric
When Xand van Tulleken set off on a journey into the wild west of wellness, he didn’t expect to discover anything new about vitamin D. Of all the supplements that line our shelves and social media feeds, it ought to be the least controversial; even the NHS website, which is hardly a wellspring of quackery, advises that everyone should consider taking a daily dose during autumn and winter, when we risk becoming deficient (D is the vitamin we get mostly from sunlight, and which helps keep our bones strong).
The tiggerish TV doctor and twin brother to Chris (he’s the one who wrote Ultra-Processed People about the food industry) qualified at a time of high excitement in vitamin D circles; in the early 2000s, big studies were linking it not just to bone health but cancer, heart disease and dementia. “The range of potential problems to be solved was dizzying,” Van Tulleken writes in Make Me Well.
London film festival Anna Biller’s intricate tribute to the British 1960s genre plays melodrama for laughs and pulls it off wonderfully in a medieval tale based on a Japanese ghost story
There’s over-the-top … and there’s this playfully bizarre new film from US indie film-maker and genre connoisseur Anna Biller, whose previous film The Love Witch first alerted me to her ecstatic love of style, surface and the A-pleasures of the B-movie. The Face of Horror is a deadpan homage to the garish Technicolor horror pictures of Britain’s Hammer Films in the Peter Cushing 1960s, with an extraordinary visual emphasis on red velvet, whose Freudian significance can only be guessed at. Perhaps it’s not accurate to call it pastiche – in any event, the advent of AI has arguably undermined the value of skilled pastiche in movies and literature. It is more an attempt simply to make another film in the same vein as Hammer, to continue in the same rackety tradition of melodrama, eroticism and black comedy – and to create a film that can be laughed at as well as laughed with, just as they were at the time.
The setting is a cod-medieval England, a land of courtly nobles, smudgy-faced peasants and ladies wearing floor-length gowns with rope-style belts – although Biller has taken as her starting point the classic Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, which is also an inspiration to, among others, Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata. Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) is a handsome, unscrupulous knight, suspected of robbing his former master, seen here in the opening scene riding through a sun-dappled forest with his similarly shifty squire Richard (Leo Suter). Edward wishes to marry the blond, beauteous Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), who appears in a separate scene demurely preparing a preposterously lavish meal with her equally blond sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) in one of the vast, oppressive wood-panelled halls that Hammer horror was known for.
Exclusive: Isabella Weber prescribes a common-sense solution to poverty, inequality and fascism – making life’s essentials affordable for all
The trouble with economists, Isabella Weber believes, is they do not behave like dentists. They obsess over ideological purity and are inflexible when searching for solutions, regardless of society’s symptoms. Dentists have no such pretensions – patients have little patience for dogma when in insufferable pain.
John Maynard Keynes, Weber clarifies in the canteen of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study), was the first to draw this dental comparison – and she is running with it. As she sees it, the symptoms could not be more severe. “The status quo for the majority is entirely unbearable,” while extreme inequality and corporate concentration has reached levels “simply incompatible with democracy” worldwide. This is exacerbated by a climate crisis that “generates massive windfall profits” for big business as the “ecological foundations of our lives disintegrate”. All the while the far right is making hay.
The Jack Reacher author, the UK’s first prison reading laureate, said drive to improve literacy skills was a practical way to address reoffending and support rehabilitation
Nearly half a million books will be distributed across prisons in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland this autumn, in a campaign backed by bestselling thriller writer Lee Child.
The initiative, delivered by the Reading Agency charity as part of its Quick Reads programme, will see copies of 11 short books distributed, with titles selected with input from prisoners as well as staff. A book will be distributed to every cell across the prison estate, as well as stock sent to prison libraries.
The director of Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Jojo Rabbit turns Kazuo Ishiguro’s AI fable into a twee, tiresome tale of love and grief
Taika Waititi detonates an explosion of postmodern quirkiness and ironic dorkiness in this unbearably mannered, unspeakably acted film. It’s a slice of sentimental whimsy-futurism and non-satire, adapted by Waititi from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, which winds up saying nothing substantial or meaningful (or funny) about artificial intelligence, love or grief. Klara and the Sun is soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy. With earlier films like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi showed he can do comedy. But this, sadly, is closer to his notorious fey-Hitler fantasy Jojo Rabbit – misjudged and self-admiring.
In the world to come in an uncanny valley of the almost-real, families can buy “artificial friend” or AF robots for their kids. In terms of tech plausibility overall, incidentally, their status isn’t entirely clear: AF salesperson (Natasha Lyonne) says that the recent third world war has wiped out the internet. (This post-WW3 world looks in pretty good shape apart from that.) And these AF humanoids incidentally have a kind of purple blood called PEC-9 running through them which one character incidentally tells us is “highly flammable”. (Uh-oh. Quite the design fault.)
Ian A Anderson reminds readers of The Meaning of Liff. Plus letters from Peter Lewis, John Davies, Penelope Fletcher, Phil Ivens and Chris Skelcher
Neither Adrian Chiles, in his column about placenames (7 October), nor the writers of the follow-up letters (9 October) mentioned Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s legendary 1983 dictionary of placenames, The Meaning of Liff, still in print.
Not so long ago, finding ourselves in Lincolnshire, we made a detour just to get a selfie with the village sign for Mavis Enderby (“the almost-completely-forgotten girlfriend from your distant past for whom your wife has a completely irrational jealousy and hatred”). The book is full of delightful definitions of placenames like Nempnett Thrubwell (“the feeling experienced when driving off for the first time on a brand new motorbike”) and Mellon Udrigle (“the ghastly sound made by traditional folk-singers”). Hours of endless pleasure.
Ian A Anderson Cambridge
Biographer who altered perceptions of Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, Robert Baden-Powell and other figures active in Africa
Thanks to the biographer and novelist Tim Jeal, who has died aged 81, we now know that one of the most famous sentences in journalism – “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – was almost certainly never uttered.
In November 1871, after a 700-mile expedition, the Welsh-American journalist and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer. He had been lost to the outside world for six years and was now nearing death, in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania.
Authors withdraw book planned for young readers after disputes with editors over characterizations of 7 October
A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history.
In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.
The author offers intriguing insights into the way this Dutch artist worked, including fresh perspectives on The Girl With the Pearl Earring
In the decades after the death of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1675, few knew his name or work. He was so unknown that his paintings were sold with the forged signatures of more popular artists attached. All that changed in the mid-19th century, when his art was reassessed by French critics. Today Vermeer is one of the most admired painters in the world, although, says art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, he has “proved stubbornly resistant to interpretation”.
Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Graham-Dixon’s biography which was six years in the writing, endeavours to answer some unresolved questions, among them: what was Vermeer’s life like? Why did he paint the way he did? What was the intent behind his paintings, of which only 36 exist? Unlike the Dutch genre painters of his time, the Delft-born Vermeer painted solemn yet luminous works featuring women in domestic settings and engaged in activities such as reading, writing, playing music or pouring milk. His ability to render light, and its softening effect on rooms and people, was unparalleled.
The Normal People author’s determination to support Palestine Action, even if it means that her books are withdrawn from sale in the UK, makes a mockery of Britain’s terrorism laws
It’s hard to think of a published author in living memory who risked arrest in the UK for their political beliefs, hard to think of one whose books could be published anywhere but here. Sally Rooney went into this debacle with her eyes open: she said last July that royalties from her books, and their BBC adaptations, would be used to support Palestine Action.
Rooney’s courage is not so much in risking imprisonment, since there is a fix for that, which is what she’s doing – avoiding the UK. Rather, she has chosen the thorniest possible path for this cause. Authors can write essays and sign letters in support of the Palestinian people; actors can voice it in interviews, musicians can say it from the stage, and there is always a cost to it, whether it’s in plain sight and they’ve been kicked off a global tour, or it’s behind closed doors and they are simply excluded from opportunities. But such actions, even if they logically suggest support for a proscribed organisation, don’t entail actively breaking the terrorism laws. Rooney had taken a financial hit anyway, by pledging support for Palestine Action with her royalties; but that’s a price at least you can count. The lost sales and opportunities that ripple out from being effectively both barred from and banned in the UK are innumerable.
The 1926 film of Goethe’s tragic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil remains a spectacular feat of German expressionism
The centenary of FW Murnau’s silent fantasy-melodrama from 1926 is the occasion to ponder this mysterious film, taken from Goethe’s 19th-century depiction of the alchemist and natural philosopher who sells his soul to the devil but, in a very high-minded climax of German romanticism, is redeemed by love. (Not love of God precisely, but love of a good woman; the word “Liebe” finally appears at the centre of Murnau’s radiating vision of concentric circles conjured by the heavens, which annul his debt to the Evil One.) It is therefore very different from Christopher Marlowe’s scarier and more unforgiving account of Doctor Faustus.
Murnau’s Faust is (obviously) concerned with and animated by evil, and there are echoes of his Nosferatu, made four years previously. In this film, Faust, having struck his bargain on a provisional 24-hour basis with Mephisto, finds that he is scared of a crucifix, like a vampire. It is also very much a film of Weimar Germany with its mad energy and streaks of garish satire and black comedy; the book-burning scene in which Faust immolates all his necromancy volumes, along with the Bible, is one which resonated with later events. (Perhaps it indirectly inspired Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, later to be filmed by István Szabó.)
Following the death of his wife, a critic-teacher takes a job with an art-washing multinational, in a cinematic novel that is full of ideas
At the end of a night in a London pub, after last orders have been called, three friends are joking about what role they’d serve on a remote desert island, with no one but their fellow plane crash survivors for company. When one of them, an art critic turned reluctant schoolteacher, says that he would become an artist, he is, naturally, mocked. His friend Sybil, who actually is a painter, casts herself more sensibly as a demigod-queen of the island and employs her newly creative companion to “certify her glory”. “That’s what artists are for,” she says, “I pay you in fermented coconut water and you tell yourself you’re free and drink yourself to death.”
This is about as clear a statement as one could wish for regarding the position of contemporary art as it relates to power: the boot of the latter is placed firmly on the former’s throat. This relationship is the central theme of The Floating World, Ben Eastham’s debut novel, which is narrated by the somewhat hapless and unnamed critic-teacher. And what has led to this existential pub conversation is an unexpected opportunity: following the death of the narrator’s wife in an unnamed war zone, he has been offered a job with the Morel Foundation, an art-washing spin-off of an arms-manufacturing multinational which extracts profit from all corners of a wartorn world while its cultural wing props up the ego of its eponymous overlord CEO.
The novel had no hero, no dialogue and little action. So how was I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turned into such a funny, rousing and acclaimed film? Director Clio Barnard reveals all
As a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings. The demolition of the city’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement. The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives.
Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living. Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. “So I feel quite splintered,” he says. “I’m not sure anyone ever really leaves the world they grew up in.”
Wonderful, exuberant stories spill out in these honest tales of lives genuinely transformed by literature – while Queen Camilla has an off-with-their-heads moment
You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.
Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …
Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers
The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.
Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”
Christopher Gardner, the author of Food Sense and director of nutrition studies at Stanford, says we have overcomplicated the question of what to eat
Finally, some good news: eating well is more straightforward than you think. “There’s a lot of good science out there, and it mostly agrees,” says Stanford University’s director of nutrition studies and professor of medicine Christopher Gardner from his office in Palo Alto – beaming, bronzed and the picture of health.
In the age of social media and wellness grift, we’ve overcomplicated the question of what to eat, he says.
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a time-travelling fantasy novel to an eclectic essay collection. Discuss what you’re reading in paperback in the comments
Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe
Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.
Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.
Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight
Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.
As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.
There are shades of JG Ballard in this tale of survival in a decaying metropolis, but big ideas and lengthy exposition crowd out the human drama
Hernan Diaz’s last novel, the formally inventive Trust, narrated the biography of a successful financier from four different viewpoints to investigate themes of memory, representation, fiction and the fictitiousness of money. It was both critically and commercially successful and won the Pulitzer prize. His latest book, Ply, is a speculative epic set in a decaying city. While the time and location are never spelled out, the evidence strongly suggests a version of New York City several centuries into the future. A series of upheavals have depopulated this “shipwrecked world of dilapidated bygone grandeur”.
There is more than a flavour of JG Ballard’s The Drowned World in the way the rewilded city is depicted: the lynx and deer stalking the streets, “the downtown swamp where the blind limbs and tendrils of trees and climbers have been at work for ages pulling the last line of collapsing buildings down into the spongy soil under the water”. Somewhere beyond the city, a more technologically sophisticated life endures. The evidence for this are the monopolistic companies Flow and Tensor, which control water and electricity respectively; and CTS, an unexplained acronym for a private security company that protects their interests and “holds a monopoly over monitoring and patrolling of the streets”.
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