From The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels discovers what ails Shakespeare’s King Lear. Old man redeemed: Ian McKellen takes a quieter, eventually wiser King Lear on tour (and an interview). Tiny Ninja Shakespeare! When it comes to quotability, no one, but no one, beats the Bard.
Salman Rushdie has been made knight, Buckingham Palace announced yesterday, a reward for abandoning the anti-establishment stance he once espoused. Britain's most formidable literary couple: A new Pinter revival has opened to rave reviews, while his wife Antonia Fraser continues to write bestselling biographies. How did a working-class divorcee and a Catholic aristocrat become Britain's formidable literary couple? Kingsley Amis never quite caught on with Americans. Why not? asks Michael Dirda. Beyond Wives and Lovers: In a new book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, the literary scholar Sharon Marcus maps out the complex geography of Victorian womanhood. The secret world of E M Forster: The novelist's letters reveal his private passions He is famous for stories that feature clashes between class and culture. But, says Zareer Masani, there is another theme to one of his most famous works: his own, unrequited, homosexual passions.
The Harder They Write: Caribbean literature is a concept in flux at Jamaica's Calabash International Literary Festival, writes Carlin Romano. Notes from a small island: Daniel Trilling discovers a thriving literary scene between the mountains and the Caribbean. He drew upon the horrors of his captivity in a Japanese concentration camp to spin mesmerizing tales of adventure in the Far East. Meet James Clavell, the man who gave us Shogun. A Red-Envelope Day: Artist and author Nathan Huang looks at how a Chinese New Year tradition in his family came to an end.
From n+1, Whatever Minutes: How we've developed a cultural style of ceaseless babbling. Better than famous: A review of The Big Book of Pop Culture: A How-to Guide for Young Artists by Hal Niedzviecki. Peter Blake was paid only £200 for the Sgt Pepper album cover in 1967 and has never made much money since. But meeting the grandfather of British pop art in the cabinet of curiosities that is his studio, Lynn Barber decides he is certainly a national treasure. Fade Out: Popular music, like other media, has fragmented, and the day of the rock star as broad cultural icon is behind us. The Boys in the Band Are in AARP: The classic American midlife crisis has found a new outlet: garage-band rock ’n’ roll.
Even as an occasional endeavor, the arts have the power to transform lives, so go ahead and sue me: Just liking books is fine. Peer-to-peer book reviews fill a niche: Social-networking websites that connect people through their taste in literature are gaining in popularity – and publishers are starting to take notice. We live in the Internet age, and one of the things we love about the Internet is its ability to connect people to each other, right? Maybe instead of always doing it themselves, artists could do it with others once in a while. Social software is ready for business, but is business ready for social software? Companies of all kinds are figuring out which tools work and how to use them.
