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The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder by Karen Harvey review – a simple case? [25 Jan 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/imposteress-rabbit-breeder-karen-harvey-review The remarkable story of a woman giving birth to rabbits enthralled the nation. What was going on? In October 1726 an extraordinary story emerged from the market town of Godalming in Surrey that captivated the nation. According to reports, confirmed by three eminent doctors, a young woman named Mary Toft had given birth to 17 rabbits – or at least the mangled parts of a number of the animals – and was about to deliver more. As news of the births stoked a media frenzy, Toft was taken to London – at the request of George I – and installed in a bagnio while doctors awaited her next delivery. There was no 18th rabbit. After nine days a porter revealed that Toft’s husband had bribed him to smuggle in a rabbit and the whole hoax was uncovered. Toft was arrested and later confessed that her mother-in-law had persuaded her to concoct the story, with the aid of some strategically placed rabbit parts, as a money-making ruse. The doctors who had so enthusiastically testified to the bizarre births were publicly humiliated and the fraud provided journalists, satirists and artists with fertile material for comedy for decades to come. Continue reading... post comment

Exclusive: John Bercow on friends, enemies and the drama of Brexit [25 Jan 2020|09:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/john-bercow-speaker-house-commons-memoir After a decade as Speaker, he recalls toxic times in the House of Commons and gives his no-holds-barred verdict on the key players It is 11.30am on Wednesday, 25 September 2019. Unexpectedly, the House of Commons is sitting again. It ceased to do so on 9 September and had not thought it would resume until a state opening on 14 October. Without a doubt, it is the most peculiar atmosphere I have known in the chamber in my more than 22 years as a member of parliament. The expressions on government ministers’ faces range from affronted dignity to sheepish embarrassment to world-weary resignation. Opposition MPs, meanwhile, are jubilant. Surveying the scene from my vantage point of the Speaker’s chair, I began proceedings on this extraordinary day with a gentle but clear signal of contentment that the government’s plan to close down or “prorogue” parliament for five weeks at the height of the unresolved Brexit crisis had been foiled. “Colleagues, welcome back to our place of work.” Continue reading... post comment

From fig leaves to pinups: Mary Beard on the evolution of the nude [25 Jan 2020|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/25/mary-beard-nude-art-male-gaze-naked-desire-female-perspective The male gaze has shaped art’s obsession with the naked body. Mary Beard offers a female perspective Mary Beard is standing on a chair, chiselling the fig leaf off a large classical statue in Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. “God this is quite exciting. My hand is taut with the nerves of it all,” she says, though what lies beneath the familiar modesty motif turns out to be something of a disappointment. The statue, cast in plaster from an original in the Vatican collection, has suffered “a limited castration”, with the result that the fig leaf – probably added in the 19th century to spare the blushes of Irish art lovers – had nothing much to hide. “There’s something really ironic about these things that were meant to stop you seeing things,” Beard reflects, “when what they end up doing is saying: ‘Look at what you can’t see.’” Her outing to Cork comes midway through the first episode of Shock of the Nude, a two-part BBC Two series which sets out to interrogate western art’s obsession with the naked body. The Cambridge classics professor has already marvelled at the marble musculature of Michelangelo’s David and tried her hand at a life-drawing hen party (“He’s got very good bum cheeks,” enthuses one of the group). These scenes are a subversion of Beard’s central thesis: “I don’t think you can talk about the nude unless you talk about male desire.” Given the dominance of the male gaze, the programmes ask, how is a woman to find her own perspective? Continue reading... post comment

Happy ever after: why writers are falling out of love with marriage [25 Jan 2020|02:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/happy-ever-after-why-writers-are-falling-out-of-love-with-marriage From Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh to the author of this year’s hit debut, Kiley Reid, a new generation of novelists is turning the marriage plot on its head Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 classic Little Women begins with an adult Jo March entering the smoke-filled, man-filled offices of a New York publisher in hopes of selling a story. “If the main character’s a girl make sure she’s married by the end,” the editor decrees. “Or dead, either way.” Alcott herself never married and thought that Jo “should have remained a literary spinster”. But after publication of the first volume of the book, covering the March sisters’ childhood, Alcott was flooded with letters from fans demanding to know whom the little women had married. In rebellion, Alcott “made a funny match” for Jo, forgoing the obvious choice of Laurie in favour of Professor Bhaer, a middle-aged German, “neither rich nor great, young nor handsome, in no respect what is called fascinating, imposing, or brilliant”. Continue reading... post comment

Tracey Thorn: ‘I went through a phase of carrying Camus under my arm’ [25 Jan 2020|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/tracey-thorn-interview-another-planet-memoir The musician on rereading her teenage diaries and why she’s now a fervent fan of Jack Reacher Tracey Thorn began her career as a singer and musician, before becoming best known as half of Everything But the Girl, with her lifelong partner, Ben Watt. She then became a solo artist, and a writer of three bestselling books: her 2013 memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, 2016’s Naked at the Albert Hall and Another Planet, published last year, which traces her years growing up in London’s suburbs, and is out in paperback on 6 February. How does writing about the 1970s world of Another Planet feel now? My own kids can’t imagine how we ever survived when I tell them about staying in all evening waiting for a phone call from someone, who you’d then arrange to meet under a clock tower in a nearby town, only to have the bus cancelled and not be able to get there. The thing that strikes me now is how locally rooted our lives were. Without the internet, we had no access to other people in other places, so we did a lot of dreaming and a lot of fantasising. The rest of the time, we just tried to avoid dying of boredom. Continue reading... post comment

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