By David
|
February 2, 2008
Bedroom furniture for young girls with the brand name Lolita has been withdrawn by Woolworths following complaints from parents
BBC, Woolworths withdraws ‘Lolita’ bed
Easily the most startling fact in this farce was that nobody at Woolworths knew of Nabokov’s great novel, ‘one of the best known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature‘; nobody had seen or heard of either of the two films (the James Mason/Peter Sellers pairing, directed by Kubrick being far better than the later Adrian Lyne version); and nobody at the company was even remotely aware of the enormous popular cultural impact of Lolita. According to BBC radio news this evening, Woolworths staff had to look up Lolita on Google to discover what the fuss was about, which might have given them a little shock.
By David
|
December 4, 2007
This summer in Spain I read, for the first time, Don Quixote - and I ploughed through some parts of the rather thick book in the Don’s homeland, the region of La Mancha.
I thought I’d solved the puzzle of the protagonist’s name: Key-Ho-Tay or Kwiksot?
By David
|
November 30, 2007
Gavin wondered if anyone had predicted that an Orwellian, totalitarian state might come in a religious guise.
Well the answer’s yes, of course. Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale describes a totalitarian theocracy that specifically (for this is Atwood) oppresses women. She just picked the wrong religion.
Assistant Secretary-General at the Muslim Council of Britain, Inayat Bunglawala, on not expressing regret for murderous threats:
So on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death, I was truly elated. It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority…
Looking back now on those events I will readily acknowledge that we were wrong to have called for the book to be banned.
Inayat Bunglawala on Comment Is FreeI used to be a book burner
Satanic Verses Death Timeline
- February 12, 1989: Six people are killed and 100 injured during anti-Rushdie protests in Islamabad, Pakistan.
- February 13, 1989: One person is killed and 60 injured in anti-Rushdie riots in Srinagar, India.
- February 24, 1989: Twelve people die in anti-Rushdie rioting in Bombay, India.
- 1990: Five bombings target bookstores in England.
July 1991: Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, is stabbed to death
- July 1991: Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, is seriously wounded.
- July 2, 1993: Thirty-seven Turkish intellectuals and locals participating in the Pir Sultan Abdal Literary Festival, die when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey, namely the Madimak Hotel, is burnt down by 2000 members of various anti-democratic, pro-sharia radical islamist groups protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie’s Turkish translator.
- October 1993: The novel’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, is shot and seriously injured
In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a
Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End of
Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the
major religious texts, he documents the ways in which
religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual
repression, and a distortion of our origins in the
cosmos.
By David
|
February 8, 2007
Zeldman’s redesigned Happy Cog and his story about his science teacher suggests a tricksy, sly, and clever man. By the way, buy his book, I did (and I’m not getting an Amazon referral for that).
By David
|
January 4, 2005
Helen picked up a book called The Story Of The World In Pictures
for £4.99 in a local charity shop. It doesn’t seem to have a publication date but there is a small copyright notice dating it to 1934.
worldstory/cinema
Queueing Up For The Cinema In Malaya
The caption reads:
