Page 6 - Christopher Ricks News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Written by Andrew McCallum Waiting for Bob Dylan’s Auckland show in 2018 to start, I had a chat with an older man in the seat two rows down from mine. “Is this your first show?” I asked. “Yes” he said. “Dylan’s a legend. I gotta see him.”  A moment later an announcement came over the PA: there are to be no cameras, no photos, no video recordings during the concert. Turn your phones OFF! The announcement is repeated several times. Five-part web series Bob Dylan's New Zealand airing on Nine to Noon from 24th May and available on-demand here.

Not long ago, in my capacity as a literary editor, I was exchanging emails with the eminent Dylanologist Clinton Heylin. Heylin wanted to review a new biography of Bob Dylan and I was sceptical. Could there be anything more to say about Dylan? Haven’t those ashes, by now, been thoroughly raked? “There have been so many,” I complained. “You obviously know something I don’t,” Heylin replied with a steely good grace – because, needless to say, I knew, and he knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew, the chances of me knowing something he didn’t on the subject were as slim as the ch...

“She was a narcissist who described herself beautifully.” The description of the mid 20th-century novelist Jean Rhys doesn’t apply to the author who wrote it, even if, in style and sentiment, it epitomises the publication in which it appeared – sly, aphoristic and unapologetically imperious. Mary-Kay Wilmers published her first piece for the London Review of Books in 1981, two years after joining the “paper” as an editor and 11 years before she became the editor-in-chief. (She is also the owner.) Since then, the LRB, which has a circulation of around 80,000 according to the Au...

Abstract This essay gives a brief overview of the events of 26-27 August 1883, when the volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia exploded; it generated tsunamis which killed over 36,000 people, was heard 3,000 miles away, and produced measurable changes in sea level and air pressure across the world. The essay then discusses the findings of the Royal Society’s Report on Krakatoa, and the reports in the periodical press of lurid sunsets resulting from Krakatoa’s dust moving through the atmosphere. It closes by examining literature inspired by Krakatoa, including a letter by Gerard Manley H...