6 Dec 2011

Palestinian 'unpeople'

Letter to Evening Standard, 19oct2011 - Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has just been released from detention by Hamas, merits a front-page photo and ten mentions of his name in yesterday’s Standard. Yet not a single Palestinian, among the hundreds released by the Israelis, seems to deserve a mention by name. Your lopsided reporting reminds me how, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the Palestinians are treated in the papers as “unpeople”.

19 Oct 2011

booksellers favourite 'asked-fors'

All booksellers and librarians have their favourite 'asked-fors' — requests from members of the public for a particular book. See if you can guess the proper titles of these literary classics. Scroll down for the answers.

Dining out in Paris and London
1. The Odd Sea

2. Oranges and Peaches

3. 100 Years of Playing Solitaire

4. The Brothers Carry Them Off

5. Ann in Spectacles

6. Sergeant Bilko’s Banjo

7. Honour Road

8. The Great Gas Bill

9. Dr Wells Fargo

10. Anna, Karen and Edna

11. Donkey Oats

12. James Joyce is Useless

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Down and out in Paris and London (Orwell)

1. The Odyssey (Homer)

2. The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

3. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

4. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

5. An Inspector Calls (J B Priestley)

6. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)

7. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

8. The Great Gatsby  (F Scott Fitzgerald)

9. Dr Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)

10. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)

11. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

12. James Joyce’s Ulysses

26 Sept 2011

Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers

"When I find a short-seller, I want to tear his heart out and eat it before his eyes while he's still alive." Richard S. Fuld, Jr (1946–), US CEO and chairman of the collapsed Lehman Brothers investment house. Quoted in the Financial Times (London) (December 30, 2008)

25 Jan 2011

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech 2005

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.