ninme

Telegraph Blogs - Holy Smoke - Bishops support book attacking the Pope

Catholic Social Justice, a volume of essays put together by an agency of the Bishops’ Conference, systematically rubbishes Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). The book has been given a glowing foreword by the Bishop of Plymouth, Christopher Budd.

I [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

Telegraph - With all its treasures sold, who will visit Italy? By Malcolm Moore

The story is the same throughout Italy. A combination of incompetent government, lacklustre industry and a general refusal to pay taxes has left a deep scar on the country’s finances. The country’s crushing debts have forced the Bel Paese to [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

You scored as Emma Woodhouse, Emma is possibly one of the most loyal characters of Austen, always wanting better for those around her and doing all she possibly can to make it happen. Her motives sometimes get in the way of her good intentions and her own opinions can end up ruling her actions, [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

I’m seriously considering installing a net-nanny to block any page with the word “Harry Potter” in it. I just know some a-hole will say something.

See, the thing is, I won’t buy the American versions (early installments had the English translated to American because we’re all idiots here in this country, according to our publishing [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

Thank goodness! They like to dick around with little children too!

BBC - JK Rowling rails against spoilers

JK Rowling has hit out at US newspapers that have published plot details from the final Harry Potter book. The author said she was “staggered” that papers including The New York Times had [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Times - How A Laydee showed that First Impressions really are misleading

A frustrated author has confirmed what other unpublished writers have long suspected: even Jane Austen would have difficulty finding a book deal in the 21st Century. But what really astonished David Lassman was that only one of 18 [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

Silicon Glen - Received from an English Professor

**Received from an English Professor You know that book Men are from Mars, Women from Venus? Well, here’s a prime example of that. This assignment was actually turned in by two of my English students: Rebecca (last name deleted) and Gary (last name [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The new Harry Potter book is online. If any of you go close to a blog entry or article on anything approaching the subject, you’re banished from my presence. If you try to say anything about it, I’ll come and find you. Just so you’re warned.

And if the human pestilence responsible for [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

BBC - Vatican Library closure irks scholars

One of the world’s oldest public libraries, the Vatican Library, has closed for rebuilding. It is not expected to reopen before September 2010. The reading rooms were unusually full last week. Bespectacled university professors, graduate students from famous [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Sunday Times - Let Tintin the racist speak, by India Knight

I’m sharing this to give the furore over Tintin in the Congo, by the Belgian artist Hergé, a bit of context. The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has backed a call for the book to be banned. French and Belgian children can [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Sunday Times - Hands off 007 or I’ll shoot you Jeremy Clarkson

I am not a jealous man. I do not sit around all day coveting my neighbour’s helicopter or your new hair system. Some people are fortunate and others are not, and anyone who fights that truism is on a path that leads [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Times - The mission: to bring James Bond back to life. The man: Sebastian Faulks

(What, you think I’m all gloom and doom?)

James Bond is being brought back to life in a new novel. Sebastian Faulks, one of Britain’s most respected authors, is taking up where Ian Fleming left off at his death [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Times - Bring the Prince into the Cabinet right away Thunderer: Godfrey Barker

Now this is not just remarkable, it is royal. Public bodies sit paralysed, and the Prince of Wales acts. In the darkest part of Ayrshire lurks Dumfries House, a mid-18th-century miracle thrown up for the Marquess of Bute by Robert Adam, [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Times - Paean of praise to the ginger-ninjas When Titian-haired Ginny Dougary wrote a choral piece celebrating redheads, it brought home to her how much ‘gingerism’ there is in England

The e-mails from the choir built up to a great clamour in the days leading up to the Overture Weekend – the grand-scale reopening [...]

Categories: Art and Literature

The Sunday Times - Rushdie, the man they love to hate Surely there’s a difference between careful diplomacy and pandering to extremists, India Knight

What an extraordinary, if depressingly predictable, fuss about Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. Eighteen years after the fatwa was issued, Ijaz ul-Haq, the Pakistani religious affairs minister, last week told his country’s parliament [...]

Categories: Art and Literature