Page 5 - Sam Leith News Today

Comedian Dave Chappelle (pictured) is being blasted after making transphobic remarks in his sixth Netflix special, The Closer. Some critics are calling on the streaming service to axe the standup special

During his sixth Netflix special, The Closer, Chappelle, 48, joked about Rowlings argument that transgender women were not actually women and were a threat to her identity.

26 Jul 2021 Britain’s Health Secretary Sajid Javid has apologised for saying that it is time to “learn to live with, rather than cower from” the coronavirus, in a failed attempt to appease pro-lockdown critics. “Please, if you haven’t yet, get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus,” Javid had said in a now-deleted social media post announcing he was recovered from his own coronavirus infection. Predictably, the Health Secretary soon found himself acc...

Bashed out in just 35 days on a knackered old typewriter sporting a bullet hole from his days as a war reporter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day Of The Jackal — 50 years old this month — changed thriller writing for ever. It didn’t matter that everyone knew the ending before they read it; set in the early 1960s, the plot revolves around a professional assassin’s attempt to kill Charles de Gaulle. But the former French president had died at home several months earlier in November 1970. Nor...

The best (and worst) novels of 2021 so far In this regularly updated guide, our critics review the best of the years fiction – and suggest a few books to avoid Eight of the best: this years top novels The Start-Up Wife by Tahmima Anam ★★★☆☆ Tahmima Anam is best known as the award-winning writer of three novels (A Golden Age, The Good Muslim and The Bones of Grace), and less well-known as the executive director of a music technology startup called ROLI. An experience no doubt plumbe...

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Shalom Auslander’s last novel, Hope: A Tragedy, featured a “foul-mouthed and geriatric Anne Frank” among its characters, said Sam Leith in The Guardian. In his latest work, he again risks offending readers with a satire about cannibals being a “persecuted minority”. Seventh Seltzer is a New York publisher who belongs to a dwindling band of “Cannibal-Americans”. Having “married out” of his tribe, he no longer participates in family rituals. Yet when his mother summons him to h...

See all pages Jonty Claypole, the BBC’s director of arts, grew up with a stammer, said Ben Cooke in The Times. In Words Fails Us, he powerfully argues that all conditions which involve “disfluency” – such as stammering, Tourette’s and aphasia – should be looked on more positively. For much of history, he points out, “speech disorders were thought of as “malfunctions”, sometimes treated with grotesque remedies – including, in the 19th century, “gory incisions” to the ton...

See all pages Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, which received rave reviews when it was published in Australia last autumn, is a story of “extinction, both personal and environmental”, said Amanda Craig in The Spectator. It is set in the summer of 2019-20, when raging bushfires were wiping out Tasmania’s “cornucopia of flora and fauna”.  In a Hobart hospital lies 86-year-old Francie, close to being wiped out herself. With her are her three grown-up children: successful professionals...

Share Its brief was simple — ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’. This it has done ever since by publicising an annual shortlist of toe-curling extracts from the sex scenes of a handful of novels published that year, and then announcing the winner at a high-toned party just before Christmas in central London at which the winner, should they have the courage to turn up, is a...