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Although science fiction stories help us escape the surly bonds of Earth, they draw us back to human nature and its inescapable flaws, writes Chris Deerin.
A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity...
The suggestion that Beloved, Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel about slavery and its afterlives, is also a parable about the publishing industry would be bizarre, even offensive—if, that is, Morrison herself hadn’t explicitly suggested it. For years, Morrison had felt not merely penned in by her career as an editor at the publishing giant Random House; she had felt indentured, “held in contempt—to be played with when our masters are pleased, to be dismissed when they are not,” as she declared in a
Peter Weir’s cult classic suggests that something is lost in a world without hierarchy.
I like to think that I first saw Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World under near ideal circumstances—ideal to both appreciate the