Writing

The use of voice-overs by actors or comedians from working-class backgrounds not only obfuscates the class origins of those making the programme; it also bolsters the programme’s claims to authenticity.

In many respects, post-reality TV documentary—like reality TV before it—goes out of its way to conceal the class differences between those who are making the programmes and those who feature in them. Like tabloid...

It seems to me that Hughes wanted to be a writer more than he wanted to write; the difference isn’t always obvious, even to the person doing the wanting, and talent, which you feel ought to be a clue, may be a red herring.

Clean Reader—“the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words”—sells more than a million ebooks from its online book store. Its app allows users to search the text, and “put a non-transparent “highlight””...

But when the country that designed globalisation, imposed it and benefited from it most votes against it, you have to consider the possibility that it is going to end, and suddenly. If so, you also have to consider a...

it shouldn’t surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing...

The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they’re a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to...

the toppling of solitary and silent reading as the most powerful and important medium were already waiting in the wings while Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg dipped their pens in their dugouts.

unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds...

Writers who aim at effect by describing possible novels but never write them also impress me less these days. Borges, the arch-indexer of synopses, may have kicked this ball into play, but when Calvino’s character Silas...

Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...

Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...

INTERVIEWER Do you write down your dreams? FERRANTE The rare times that I seem to remember them, yes. I’ve done it since I was a girl. It’s an exercise that I would recommend to everyone. To subject a dream experience to the...

Compared to other contemporary programming languages, Ruby does sometimes look old-fashioned. But it’s important to keep in mind that “never be too innovative” is also a key to creating beautiful code.”

Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says: “The future composts the past.” There’s even a law to describe this, Riepl’s Law—which says “new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes...