Finding an Audience
On the laws that kept Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories and the work of his successors out of readers’ reach.
Monday, January 25, 2021
Northern view of the cantonment, Karachi, from the sea shore at Clifton, by Henry Francis Ainslie, 1851. British Library.
Lapham’s Quarterly is running a series on the history of best sellers, exploring the circumstances that might inspire thousands to gravitate toward the same book and revisiting well-loved works from the past that, due to a variety of circumstances, vanished from the conversation after they peaked on the charts. We are also publishing a digital edition of one of these forgotten best sellers, Mary Augusta Ward’s 1903 novel Lady Rose’s Daughter
Top 10: the TS Eliot Prize shortlist
Each year, the T S Eliot Prize offers poets a chance to win a huge sack of cash, and critics a chance to generalise about trends in poetry. So here goes: long fragmentary narratives are in, love poems are out (though Natalie Diaz unfashionably flies the flag for sensual abandon). Who’ll win the £25,000 prize? If I were judging, it’d be Sasha Dugdale or Shane McCrae. But I’m not, so I’d bet on Diaz, with a side-flutter on Bhanu Kapil.
I’m sore about the omission of Timothy Donnelly’s superb The Problem of the Many, and wouldn’t have minded a bit of light relief (Caroline Bird, say, or Matthew Welton) but otherwise this is a strong and unusually ambitious list. Like last year, and the year before, and the year before that, half the nominees are university dons, but this year the books
Telstar and touring - the Cape family s travellers tale
18 Jan, 2021 03:00 PM
7 minutes to read
Telstar and Touring
[Parallels are fascinating. This time last year I d just returned to New Zealand after two weeks in Brisbane. Little did I know how the world would change in eight weeks.
In 1962 the cold war and nuclear threats were real. The free world was under threat from a perceived insidious enemy. Human rights and status quos were being questioned. Communication technologies were being advanced and science on all sides of political divides was reaching for the stars.
In April 1962, in spring, the Cape family had reached England on board the MS Oranje, a passenger liner operated by the Royal Dutch Mail Netherland line. My father, Peter Cape, was to train with the BBC in London in television production techniques and return to the NZBC, where he would become senior television producer with WNTV1.
The inconvenient truth about art – ugly people can create beautiful things
Social media calls to erase Phil Spector and his evil ilk from the canon are impossibly naive – it would be easier to expunge art itself
Phil Spector with his ex wife Ronnie, in the 1960s
Credit: Redferns
Does great art transcend morality? Or, more demotically, can we still listen to The Ronettes now we’ve all been inconveniently reminded that Phil “Wall of Sound” Spector spent his last years in prison for the gratuitous murder of a young actress?
A flurry of social media snowflakes playing catch-up want to cancel the former music producer on the grounds of his heinous crime (which took place in 2003, kids). Admirers of Spector’s pioneering contribution to pop are less hardline: “Hey guys, so he shot a woman but he produced the Beatles’ album Let It Be, wrote River Deep - Mountain High and worked with Leonard Cohen, for chrissakes.”
Martin Lambie-Nairn
Credit: Ashley Bingham at A&M Photography
Martin Lambie-Nairn, who has died aged 75, was one of Britain’s leading television graphic designers, creating memorable logos for the BBC and Channel 4, as well as coming up with the original idea for the Spitting Image series.
Credited with the concept of “an adult Muppet Show”, Lambie-Nairn recalled having a brainwave in the middle of a winter’s night in 1981: a satirical show featuring grotesque caricatures of public figures, politicians, royalty and celebrities, like the Plasticine models made by Peter Fluck and Roger Law he had seen in Sunday newspaper colour supplements but with animated puppets.