The UK Times lists the Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century"Sixteen weeks after we invited you to have your say, the votes are in - all 1.4 million of them. Here, we reveal the results of our poll, in conjunction with the Saatchi, to discover who you think are the greatest artists working since 1900"
Care to guess who America's best-loved novelist is?
It's Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb, who is profiled in the New Yorker. Twenty-seven Nora Roberts books are sold every minute. Roberts grosses sixty million dollars a year, Forbes estimated in 2004, more than John Grisham or Stephen King.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Two million online digitised pages of 19th century newspaper, take researchers back to the future
The British Library, in partnership with JISC and Gale, part of Cengage Learning, has today launched the public version of its 19th century British Library Newspaper website.
"Bathing machines, children as young as nine smoking and drinking, Vesta Tilley - London’s very own Pop Idol, the banking collapse of 1878 and zero percent income tax, are just a few of the fascinating items researchers can now look at online.
For the first time ever, users regardless of their location will be able to explore over two million pages of newspaper from 49 national and regional UK titles at the click of a button. With enhanced search capabilities and new imaging techniques, serious and amateur researchers now have access to vivid newspaper reports previously only available via hard copy in Reading Rooms...
Users are now able to read first-hand factual reporting of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News. Alternatively, researchers can access reports directly at their desktops on the first FA Cup final between Wanderers and Royal Engineers at the Kenington Oval in 1872 or the first England-Australia Test match in 1877. Some of the most famous authors of the 19th century are also represented, including Dickens and Thackeray."
Visit the website here.
US book-purchasing and reading habits for 2008
Recently, Bowker released US book-purchasing and reading habits for 2008, derived from a 60-75 question survey of 36,000 book buyers.Half of Americans bought a book in 2008; 45% of American read a book in 2008. Most books were purchased by female shoppers. Seniors are adopting the Kindle the fastest. The mystery-detective fiction genre is the most popular. Its readers are also the least affluent. Internet bookstores have surpassed large chain bookstores for book shopping. Internet ads created awareness for books for 54.1% of respondents. Online reviews are driving decisions 2x the rate of printed reviews.
Three New Search Services: Wolfram|Alpha, Microsoft Bing, Google Squared
"It has been a wild few weeks in search engines or search-engine-like services. We've seen the introduction of no fewer than three high-profile tools Wolfram|AlphaL1, Microsoft BingL2, and Google SquaredL3 each with their own strengths and
needing their own techniques or, at least, their own distinct frame of reference in order to maximize their usefulness.
This post from Disruptive Library Technology Jesterdescribes these three services, what they are generally good for, and how to use them".
UK Novelist Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books: 'On Being a Social Worker'
"I was a social work assistant, paid a very small sum by the NHS and meant to be learning on the job, pending some formal traineeship that never in fact materialised. No one knew what I was for or how I should spend my days. Sometimes the real social workers took me out with them to other hospitals in the group: the Home for Incurables, for instance, or the busy, modern general hospital where I once saw a young doctor looking at X-ray plates upside down". Read more here.
Rare Book Review reports a world-record price for an extremely rare unopened and uncut copy of Joyce’s Ulysses was achieved at the recent London Olympia book fair.
"Soon after the doors opened on Thursday 4th June, a private collector paid £275,000 for the signed first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, which was offered by Peter Harrington. This extremely rare copy is one of four copies unaccounted for, and has remained in single ownership until now. The book is in pristine condition, unopened except for the famous last chapter, which comprises Molly Bloom’s pornographic soliloquy and concludes in an orgasmic ‘yes’. After being banned in the United States due to its explicit content, Ulysses was smuggled into the country and sold by an avant-garde bookshop in New York, the Sunwise Turn, to Mrs Hewitt Morgan, previous owner of the unopened copy".
DIGITAL BRITAIN: THE FINAL REPORT
This report is the British Government's strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy.
Professor Mark Edmundson reflects on bores, particularly in academia... More at American Scholar.
Giles cartoons online
The Carl Giles Archive, the single most important archive of British newspaper cartoons, and a key resource for British political and social history has never before been open to the public. The collection will become a major part of the existing University of Kent Cartoon Centre, thereby creating the largest archive of cartoons in the UK. Some wonderful Giles stuff here.
The real Tramp?
Sarah Churchwell examines in the TLS how Charlie Chaplin became trapped by his own creation, and how he attained the visual grace and poetry of his films - by relentless work and perfectionism.
"The genius of Charlie Chaplin’s films is inextricable from the poetry and grace of his visual metaphors, metaphors that are beyond description. But that doesn’t stop Louvish from trying. Film historians and Chaplin fanatics will find this book a treasure trove of information; less devoted, or less dogged, readers may find themselves overwhelmed by description and detail. Louvish is interested less in Chaplin than in Chaplin’s creation, “Charlie”: “this character, larger than life and perhaps more real than his creator, deserves a biography of his own"
More here.
Shelley King takes a fresh look in the UK THES between the covers of classic books via Marah Gubar’s 'Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature'.
“Adopting the term ‘Artful Dodger’ from the young but knowing thief in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist to describe children who defy the stereotype of universal naivety and innocence, [Marah Gubar] explores the Victorian fascination with all forms of precocity and in the process reveals a culture that shares many of our own contemporary anxieties regarding childhood, sexuality and public performance. And yes, gentle reader, she knows she’s playing with fire in suggesting the possibility of autonomous complicity in the child.” More here
Popul ar Penguins series
Penguin Books Australia has announced there are 50 more titles coming in their Popular Penguins series. The new books will be available in Australian bookshops from July 2009 and include titles such as A Room of One’s Own, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Brideshead Revisited, Dracula, Fever Pitch, Madame Bovary, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Persuasion, The War of the Worlds and Wuthering Heights. There will also be 13 Australian titles, including work from some of our best known and loved writers such as Nick Cave, Marcus Clarke, Timothy Conigrave, Ruth Cracknell, Robert Drewe, Helen Garner, Sonya Hartnett, Henry Handel Richardson, Donald Horne, Elizabeth Jolley, Joan Lindsay, Ruth Park and Randolph Stow.
“With a mixture of fiction and non-fiction and a historical span that begins with Shakespeare and finishes at the end of the 20th Century, there's something here for every reader”, according to Penguin’s Sales Director Peter Blake.
Bearding Berlusconi!
The UK Guardian reports Professor Mary Beard has become the first ancient historian for 25 years to win one of the Wolfson history awards, collecting the £20,000 cheque for Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. "She was joined on the podium in Claridge's hotel in Mayfair by Margaret McGowan, author of Dance in the Renaissance, who also departed £20,000 richer. Chaired by Sir Keith Thomas, the judges included not only a Professor Sir (David Cannadine) but also a Professor Dame (Averil Cameron). The Wolfson Foundation issues no shortlists and Beard revealed its strange workings after the ceremony, saying she had been ordered to comply with a code of omertà on being informed she had won 10 weeks ago, so that she could not even tell her publisher, Profile, or invite her editor to Claridge's.
The victory completed a surreal week for the Cambridge classics professor, as a few days earlier she had come under fire from Silvio Berlusconi: her Times article "If the emperor has no clothes, history is bound to expose him" (comparing Berlusconi's Sardinian parties to the emperor Tiberius's frolics on Capri) was perhaps the final straw for the Italian PM, as it was followed the next day by a TV interview in which he blamed rows with Sky Italia for the fact that "Murdoch's group", ie the Times, "has published a series of very critical articles attacking me".
The UK Literary Review's latest issue has articles online including a review by Richard Overy of 'Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky' By Bertrand M Patenaude (Faber & Faber 340pp £20)
"For years the name Trotsky has been associated with an alternative to the crude and violent communism that grew out of Stalin's dictatorship and the hope for a purer socialism that had seemed to evaporate in the Bolshevik power struggles of the 1920s. Trotsky was in fact a revolutionary nom de plume, which the young Marxist militant Lev Davidovich Bronstein borrowed from one of his jailors in pre-revolutionary Russia. His challenge to Stalin's encroaching dictatorship not only failed to stem the Stalinisation of the revolutionary state that Trotsky had helped to build, but sealed his personal fate too. On 21 August 1940 Trotsky died in a Mexican hospital from injuries to his head sustained the previous day in an attack by a Soviet agent.
The story of Trotsky's last years in Mexico, where he arrived in January 1937, is the subject of this haunting and dramatic reconstruction of life and death in exile. The detail is fascinating, almost voyeuristic, culled from the personal records of a group of enthusiastic Trotskyists and from Trotsky's own voluminous archive, which he sold to Harvard University in 1940 for $6,000 partly because he was strapped for cash and partly because he could not be sure that Stalin would not send a fireraiser to destroy his records, just as Stalin had Trotsky expunged from the photographs of the revolutionary years. News that his archive had arrived safely came, ironically enough, on the very day that his assassin expunged Trotsky himself" More here
Also in this issue
‘Events, Dear Boy, Events’ Paul Addison reviews a new biography of Harold Macmillan that locates the root of his ambition in the notorious affair between his wife and Bob Boothby.
'Homo Liberalis' John Gray reviews a new volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, finding amid the Oxford gossip and philosophical apercus a desire for ‘gaiety and cosiness’ that hid a deeper unease.
Patricia Highsmith
The July 2, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books also has some fascinating articles including along a long piece By Michael Dirda on Patricia Highsmith. many see her only as a writer of crime fiction, but "Europeans honor her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition. Highsmith's books, after all, explore human souls in extremis, probe the fluid nature of identity, and generally conclude that life is little more than an absurdity and a cheat, when not a downright horror".
John Irving and Danielle Steel are in a New York Times Podcast
The podcast archive page is here.
Odd Book Title
Knife throwing: a practical guide Harry K McEvoy Charles E Tuttle, 1973. Libraries Australia provide locations here. And report the companion titles are also interesting.