Polymath's Guide to News and Ideas
Shafts of sunlight
GUARDIAN :Poetry is not merely a luxury for the middle classes - it offers a tough language for those with hard lives. As a TS Eliot festival opens in London... READ MORE
Bob Dylan: the beatnik bard
TIMESONLINE :When photographer Barry Feinstein dug out some of his old photographs of Sixties Hollywood, he found a manuscript tucked next to them. These were the forgotten poems a friend had written to accompany his pictures some 40 years earlier... READ MORE
What Is Art For?
NEW YORK TIMES :Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair... READ MORE
Is the books world short-changing its bright young women?
GUARDIAN :I tell this story tediously often, but as we're not married, it'll be new to you. When I was a university undergraduate, a female friend of mine got an invitation to tea from Professor Miri Rubin... READ MORE
Short Cuts
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS : People say serious writing is akin to painting. Or music. They hardly ever say it’s like maths. Or quantity surveying. But the art form that literature most closely resembles is acting: the same fascination with character and ideas... READ MORE
Tor's Worlds Without Death or Taxes
REASON :High in Manhattan’s famous Flatiron Building you’ll find the headquarters of Tor Books, the most successful science fiction publisher in the world... READ MORE
Christian group halts book launch
BBC NEWS :A poet has been forced to launch his new collection in the street after a bookstore cancelled the event because of a campaign by Christian activists... READ MORE
Literature is for everybody, writing isn't
GUARDIAN : "We've all got one book in us." At one point in my life this was my mother's mantra, with one eye, I reckon, on what at the time was the phenomenal success of Catherine Cookson... READ MORE
A Bookshelf of Change
WALL STREET JOURNAL : When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in November 1862 -- two months after the bloodiest single day of the Civil War -- the crisis he faced as president of a divided nation must have left little time to reflect on anything as inconsequential as fiction... READ MORE
Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm
NEW ENGLISH REVIEW :In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop... READ MORE