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Katherine Mansfield Born into a well-to-do New Zealand family in 1888, Mansfield was sent to school in London and at 20 moved to Europe permanently. An early and ardent admirer of Chekhov, she was part of a circle of modernist writers that included Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot. Her short stories, which dwell on the relationships between middle-class men and women and the endless ways in which they crumble, show both of these influences. At her best – and she is rarely less than her best – there is something rapturous about her work: through her acute eye and cool, appraising descriptions, she has the power to distil the apparently inconsequential into frozen moments laden with significance. She died of tuberculosis in 1923, aged 34. Three to read: Bliss and Miss Brill (both from Bliss, and Other Stories ), The Woman at the Store (from Something Childish and Other Stories ). Grace Paley The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, Paley grew up in the Bronx in New York in the 1920s – a do...

Just add photo ;)

or an imagetic Wikipedia :) Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

In the hands of Hugo Machado: Licancabur volcano is located on the border between Chile and Bolivia. Judges' Comments For Darren Smith, National Geographic design editor, “The cloud performs a delicate balancing act atop the mountain, making the two massive forces of geology and meteorology appear light. Clouds are often just garland in mountain photos, but here the cloud is an equal subject, casting shadows which help define the peak.”

Here's a Christmas tree made entirely of 18,000 recycled plastic bottles of different sizes and colours, which was erected in The Rocks area in Sydney, Australia A similar, but less ambitious, concept is seen here on a square in Paris The best, worst, weirdest and tallest Christmas trees in the world  

1. "Crazy" BY GNARLS BARKLEY In this frazzled and fragmented decade, when the Top 40 broke down into squabbling niches, the idea of a universal pop hit, a song anybody could love, seemed like a sweet old-fashioned notion. Then these guys showed up. Atlanta rapper Cee-Lo and indie producer Danger Mouse decided it would be a gas to pretend to be the world's greatest pop group, and so they gave the world "Crazy." Everybody loved this song, from your mom to your ex-girlfriend's art professor. It blasted in punk clubs and Burger King bathrooms. Every sucky band on earth tried a lame cover. For the summer of 2006, "Crazy" united us all into one nation under a groove. Gnarls Barkley packed a career's worth of genius ideas into three minutes — and then they basically disappeared. Does that make them crazy? Probably. But was this the most glorious pop thrill of our time? Totally. Rolling Stone's 100 Best Songs 

Ou a «culpa» finalmente é atribuída à editora (que tudo manda, o tradutor continua a ser um obreiro): "Mil Grous", de 1952, inicia-se com uma cerimónia do chá ("chanoyu") nos arredores de Tóquio. A caminho do templo, o protagonista Kikuji recorda com repulsa a ocasião na infância em que viu Chikako, a amante do seu falecido pai, a cortar com uma tesoura os pêlos do sinal de nascença que lhe cobria metade do peito. Kikuji está reticente: a cerimónia é organizada pela mesma Chikako, cujas intenções, ao convidá-lo, são indecifráveis. A mórbida imagem do sinal dá então lugar à sua antitética: a de uma rapariga que também se encaminha para o templo e que é metonimicamente definida pelo lenço que transporta, decorado com um padrão de mil grous. Na cerimónia, Chikako desempenha o papel de mediadora amorosa, apresentando Kikuji à portadora do lenço. Mas ali também está presente a senhora Ota, que substituiu em tempos a ominosa Chikako nas atenções do pai. Kikuji, naquel...

Jake and Carly Tompkins could have met at TRIUMF, but they decided not to. Instead, they met at the Chapters superstore in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. This one still devoted about half its space to actual pre-printed books that were for sale: guaranteed bestsellers by Stephen King, John Grisham, and Coyote Rolf. But the rest of the facility was taken up by individual display copies of titles that could be printed on demand. It took only fifteen minutes to produce a single copy of any book, either in mass-market paperback or as an octavo hardcover. Large-print editions could be had, as well, and computer-translated editions in any one of twenty-four languages could be produced in only an additional few minutes. And, of course, no title was ever out of stock. In a brilliant bit of preadaptive evolution, book superstores had been building coffee shops into their facilities for twenty years now -- giving people the perfect place to spend some pleasant time while their custom books w...

Directed by Sofia Coppola 2003 Ultra-Condensed by Doug Molitor Bill Murray (inaudible) Audience I didn't catch that. THE END      

Reading in bed is the new going out. Sort of. And with so many great authors out there you’re spoilt for choice: from Jeffrey Archer and Jordan to Chekhov and Dostoevsky. Yes, we know that’s pretty random but so is buying books. And that’s why the next present you buy the bookworm in your life should be the Bedside Booklight . This dual purpose frosted glass lamp has been designed to illuminate late night reading sessions. Mmm…The Complete Works of William Shakespeare! But wait, there’s more; the stylish Bedside Booklight is house shaped . Not in the Hugh Laurie way, in the bricks and pointy roof way. This means you can place your latest tome on its pitched roof when it’s time to slip off into boboland, safe in the knowledge your page will be saved. Genius. Don’t worry about burning holes in all that quality Katie Price prose because the lamp’s low energy 11W bulb doesn’t get too warm, even if you leave it on all night. It really is a great way to de-clutter your boudo...

Thanx to JC ;)

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. “…I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or sha...

Some of my personal favourites ;)

Coldilocks the polar bear waves at the camera, in one of a series of captivating underwater pictures that give an insight into the playful nature of polar bears...

Who are you, Joe Queenan ? ;) When I think back on this decade's spate of movies based on the great legends of European history, I remember how fantastically it started – with Gladiator – and how badly things went downhill after that: with Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, 300 and Beowulf . When I saw Gladiator in 2000, I thought this was going to be just the best millennium ever. It had everything you could want in a movie: glory, gore, guts, gladiators. It was a sweeping epic with a computer-generated cast of thousands. Augustus Caesar would have been proud of it. Julius and Tiberius, too. Yet the thing I liked most about Ridley Scott's superb film was how closely it hewed to the historical record, in its portrayal of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) as the depraved son of Marcus Aurelius, the zany old philosopher king himself. Commodus, history tells us, was in fact a vogueing headcase who liked to dress up as a gladiator, to no great effect. Gladiator was the kind of movie you ...

Check all pics for the 2010 calendar at the Telegraph Gallery , and see when and where and how :)    

 

No one apart from Keats and Jane Campion has ever much liked Fanny Brawne. “She made him ridiculous in the eyes of his friends”, wrote the critic and poet R. H. Stoddard in 1878, after the publication of Keats’s letters to her. “Look at her silhouette, and say if the cold, hard, haughty young woman who stood for that could love poetry.” Charles Armitage Brown, with whom Keats shared a bachelor pad next door to the Brawnes in Hampstead, thought her an interfering flirt and even Keats himself complained that she was “ignorant – monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx”. The Minx not only inspired the most perfect love letters in the language – “You are always new”, Keats tells her, “You always concentrate my whole senses” – but now Bright Star, written and directed by Campion, Fanny’s new champion, makes those love letters look like utility bills. As nothing is known about Br...

When I interviewed Terry Gilliam for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus a month ago, he told me he had his new Don Quixote de la Mancha , but he wouldn’t reveal who he was.  When I asked him if this person could help with the financing of the movie, he said he couldn’t.  While I spent some time trying to figure out who it could be, with little more to go on, I gave up, knowing it would eventually come out. And it did. Today. That’s because a few minutes ago I was interviewing Robert Duvall (on camera) for his new movie Crazy Heart and he told me Terry Gilliam wants him to play Don Quixote!  This is assuming Gilliam can raise the money.  While I wish I could post the video of him saying it and provide exact quotes, I’m still at the hotel.  But when I get back to the office later this afternoon I’ll update this story with the full interview.  I just wanted to get this news online immediately.  Until later today…. UPDATED : His exact quotes and th...