John Walsh: If I had an e-reader, no one would know my guilty Jackie Collins secret
2011-10-27 00:00:01.0
John Walsh: Words to go with Olympic deeds
2011-10-06 00:00:01.0
Poetry and the 2012 Olympics draw closer together. Today is National Poetry Day and it's just been announced that a line by Lord Tennyson – "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," the last line of his "Ulysses" – has been chosen to be emblazoned on a 60-yard embankment in the Athletes' Village, as a permanent encouragement to Do Better.
John Walsh: Leave a comment – but get a life
2011-09-08 00:00:01.0
Of all the figures upon whom the online community might train their arsenal of vilification, female contestants on University Challenge should rank pretty low, don't you think? But for the third season in a row, they're getting it in the neck.
John Walsh: The odd thing was, you never really wanted the third book
2011-09-01 00:00:01.0
It was widely believed by authors (though seldom admitted by publishers) that the three-for-two choice of books on Waterstone's tables was not a marketing ploy by the booksellers; that in fact it was all arranged by the publishers, who paid a fee to Waterstone's to have their authors' works prominently displayed with stickers and razzmatazz.
John Walsh: Nomads who've earned a home
2011-09-01 00:00:01.0
It's ironic that what has annoyed Basildon Council about the 80-odd Irish Traveller families, who today face eviction from the Dale Farm site in Essex, is that they don't actually travel anywhere. For a collection of nomads who call themselves, in Gaelic, Lucht Siuil – "the walking people" – they seem surprisingly static.
John Walsh: App-ril is the cruellest month?
2011-08-25 00:00:01.0
When Faber & Faber announced in June they were offering TS Eliot's The Waste Land as an iPad app, a lot of us Luddites snorted and rolled our eyes to heaven, and said, "My dear, what would poor Tom Stearns have made of this?" But we agreed that, if you really couldn't get to grips with the actual words of the Modernist masterpiece, the app certainly offered you a lot for £7.99 – recordings of the poem being read by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, Viggo Mortensen and TSE himself (sounding like a depressed bank manager throughout); a dramatised, intensely physical reading by Fiona Shaw; and hyperlinked commentaries from 30-odd literary chaps from Seamus Heaney to Craig Raine.
