Lassie returns
Paul Auster is definitely one of those people you ought to have read. Looking (lazily) at the book's hideous cover before me now, I note that the Daily Telegraph once called him "a master of the modern American fable"; the Sunday Telegraph (presumably running the same promotion) even went so far as to award him the appelation of "a genius of a novelist." Of course, as someone who's lived almost all of her life up North, I'm buggered if I know how I realised he was somehow very important (cf. last week's Features, passim); but I do know I was very excited to see he had a new book out. "At last!" I thought, "I'll be able to overcome my ignorance."...
Books: Secrets & Lies
Spin doctors. Like them or loathe them, it would seem we can't escape their influence - at least not in all-New Labour Cool Britannia Britain. The very words we use to describe them (see previous sentence) are touched by their unwholesome hands. Nor can we escape the masses of literature supposedly unmasking them, putting on display the individuals Claire Short described as "people who live in the dark." Nicholas Jones, whose new book Sultans of Spin follows closely on from Soundbites and Spin Doctors and Campaign 1997, has surely been one of the chief protagonists involved in bringing these unmentionable men to light....