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In The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has political prisoners in Stalin's gulag tell a story about Moscow's hellish Butyrka prison. One day, a young captain takes the emaciated inmates of cell 72 to a version of paradise. Barbers spray them with eau de Cologne, laundresses dress them in silk and chefs provide them with their first decent meal in years. When they go back, they find the authorities have painted their cell in bright colours. Previously forbidden books and packets of cigarettes are scattered around the room. In place of the four-gallon slop bucket is a gleaming toilet. All comments () The prisoners cannot understand their good fortune until the guards usher in a 'Mrs R', an American 'lady of great shrewdness and progressive views' who is clearly meant to be Eleanor Roosevelt. The governor tells her that they are no...

How to ... undo things Guy Browning Without doubt the greatest innovation in computing is Ctrl+Z. Pressing those two little keys undoes what you've just done. And, if you keep pressing them, they keep undoing things. It's like living life in reverse, with the added thrill that you'll get things right next time. Real life has no such key. Nothing you've done can you undo. That's why many people choose the safe option of doing nothing. Opening your mouth is the equivalent of sending an email: there is no way of retrieving what's been sent. Instead of you being able to unsay what you've said, others undo their relationship with you. The western way of doing things is progressive, and we find undoing anything deeply countercultural. But if you work on the basis that everything carries the seeds of its own destruction, wilful deconstruction will inevitably lead to som...

RIP Alexander Soljenitsine (1918-2008) FOTO William Sokolenko Neste Verão de tantas festas tão felizes... o tratamento da morte de Alexander Soljenitsine pelas televisões foi, no mínimo, discreto — este texto foi publicado no Diário de Notícias (8 de Agosto ). Diz-se que, televisivamente, o período de férias é propício a temas ligeiros e “refrescantes”. Será, sobretudo, um tempo que apela a atitudes mais descontraídas e descomplexadas... Por que não? Aliás, em nome dessa democrática ligeireza, permito-me reivindicar para o cronista a possibilidade (e, já agora, a legitimidade) de ceder à tentação de evocar apenas algumas impressões dispersas. Não serão exemplarmente veraneantes, mas tentam compensar a sua falta de rigor estatístico com a mais humilde boa vontade no sentido de compreender o mundo à nossa volta. A questão é esta: porque é que cada vez que se começa a falar em televisão da “boa disposição” e do “divertimento”, começo a ver passar no ecrã personagens hiper-sorridentes ...

A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. "What's it like in there?" asks the visitor. "Well," the devil replies, "in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives." "That's terrible!" he gasps. "I'm going to check out communist hell!" He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. "I'm still in the free world, Karl," he says, "and before I come in, I want to know what it's like in there." "In commu...

His non-lordship is not amused. Did I mention I turned down a peerage? I do like to bring it up, even though it was only a CBE. Still, one less thing for the wife to demand half of. It does so help me to talk my divorce through with the general public. All my other divorces have been delightful, so the problem can only be with this wife. Thank God for my new girl. We met at a New York power breakfast - I go to a lot of power breakfasts for obvious reasons. Yes, I'm 68 and she's 34, but these gaps contract over the years. By the time she's 46 I'll only be 80. My seduction strategy is to continue giving regular quotes on our "very warm friendship" while stressing we do not know how the warm, muggy friendship will develop. I'll use words such as "stimulating" and "charming" and "incredibly bright"; 34-year-olds love guys who talk like that, and she can't be in the slightest bit freaked out by my intensity. I'm planning to...

Chris Ware Franklin Christenson Ware is an American comic-book artist and cartoonist, best known for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth. He has drawn for many publications, including the New York Times and the New Yorker. · Powerless William Boyd Born in Ghana in 1952, Boyd won the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham awards in 1981 with his debut novel, A Good Man In Africa. Other celebrated works include Any Human Heart. His ninth novel, Restless, a wartime thriller, was published in 2006. · The Things I Stole Alice Sebold Published in 1999, her first book, Lucky, was a memoir of her rape as a freshman at Syracuse University. Her debut novel, The Lovely Bones, followed in 2002. It became an instant bestseller and is being made into a film by Peter Jackson. Her second novel, The Almost Moon, was published last year. · For The Life Of Her Julian Barnes Barnes is the author of two books of stories, two collections of essays and 10 novels, including Arthur & George...