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Britain has closed almost 800 libraries since 2010, figures show [06 Dec 2019|12:01am]

Annual survey shows sharp cuts to local authority funding have led to the loss of 17% of branches, alongside sharp staff and funding shortfalls

Almost 800 libraries have closed since the Conservative-Lib Dem government implemented austerity in 2010, new figures reveal.

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy’s (Cipfa) annual survey of the UK’s libraries, excluding Northern Ireland, shows there are 3,583 library branches still open in the UK – 35 fewer than last year. Since 2010, 773 have closed.

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Impeach by Neal Katyal review – the case against Donald Trump [06 Dec 2019|07:30am]

A US supreme court lawyer, writing with Sam Koppelman, makes a highly persuasive case for Trump’s impeachment

One of the most contentious issues during the 1787 debates about the US constitution was the subject of presidential impeachment. A Virginian named George Mason ultimately swayed the room: “No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should be continued. Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?” It was precisely the extensive power of the presidency that necessitated impeachment as the final remedy against a corrupt executive. “Shall the man who has practised corruption and by that means procured his appointment in the first instance,” Mason added, “be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”

Neal Katyal, a law professor and former acting US solicitor general, has set out “the case against Donald Trump” in his book Impeach. An experienced trial attorney who has argued before the US supreme court, Katyal knows how to present evidence and convince a jury. The result is essentially a primer for impeachment: first its basic rules and logic, and then why he considers the publicly available evidence to be so damning.

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Suncatcher by Romesh Gunesekera review – coming of age in Sri Lanka [06 Dec 2019|08:58am]

This lightly sketched tale moves towards an inevitable conclusion – but it’s dangerous to court comparisons with Fitzgerald when the writing is paint-by-numbers

Kairo is growing up in 1960s Sri Lanka at a moment of gathering political repression and destabilising social change. His father is a dyed-in-the-wool communist, in an armchair sort of way. His mother is trying to work out what to do about her son’s education now the schools have been suspended. But Kairo doesn’t care too much about all this. He’s just met Jay – be warned, it’s never a coincidence when the glamorous, wealthy character with the gilded life is called Jay – and he’s going to appear in a coming of age tale.

Jay has a life that Kairo finds intoxicating. His family are rich and live in a beautiful house; he has an attractive, unstable mother and a gangsterish uncle with a farm and a classic car collection; he likes to cycle, drive, shoot, build, skinny-dip, defend the helpless and all the other things boyhood heroes do. His bedroom is filled with metaphors for the contained experience of childhood – fish tanks, in this case, which also give us a hint of Jay’s possible fetish for control – but Jay and Kairo are growing up, and need a new, more apt metaphor for the half-freedom of adolescence. So they build a cage for Jay’s budgies, where Jay also keeps a sutikka, a bird native to Sri Lanka that he’s caught, which he calls his “Sunbeam”. The title of Romesh Gunesekera’s novel invites us to draw parallels between this bird and Jay. And if you haven’t worked out how the book ends already from the character’s name, you’ll have a second opportunity to see the story’s destination heavily foreshadowed in the fate of the bird.

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Thomas Keneally: ‘Does anyone write a good book at 83? Well, I think I have’’ [06 Dec 2019|10:00am]

The Australian novelist on crying over a Dickens biography, laughing at Kathy Lette and the classic he is ashamed not to have read

The book I am currently reading
The Barbara Kingsolver novel Unsheltered. Not quite up there with The Poisonwood Bible and Flight Behaviour, but still a magnificent novel.

The book that changed my life
Nobel prize-winning Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss. It is a sweeping and eccentric book, a modernist classic (Thomas Mann eat your heart out), and it showed me that Australians were just as entitled to write novels as anyone.

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Lisa Taddeo on her bestseller Three Women: 'I thought I was writing a quiet little book' [06 Dec 2019|11:00am]

The US journalist spent eight years talking to three women about sex and desire – and had no idea the result would be a publishing sensation. She tells Hadley Freeman what happened next

The American author Lisa Taddeo would like some breakfast. But our waiter is thwarting her. “We don’t serve food in this part of the hotel, ma’am,” he says, adding that breakfast has finished when she suggests we move. “Is nothing available?” she persists. He barely restrains a sigh. “Is a croissant OK?” “Perfect!” she says, triumphant. With another sigh, he disappears in search of what Taddeo describes as “the illicit croissant”. She then leans over and whispers, “When he comes back I’m gonna freak him out and ask if I can now have scrambled eggs.”

In the past year, Taddeo has gone from being a relatively little known journalist to one of the most celebrated authors of 2019, thanks to her extraordinary debut book about women’s appetites and desires, and how men frustrate and warp them. Three Women, which has been a bestseller in the US and the UK, tells the true stories of Maggie, Lina and Sloane, each of whom, for utterly personal and yet profoundly relatable reasons, has a complicated understanding of their own needs. Maggie alleges she had a sexual relationship with her high school teacher, Aaron Knodel, and we meet her as she’s dealing with the emotional and legal aftermath. After being raped by three classmates as a teenager, Lina married a cold, undemonstrative man, and is now, as a mother of two, embarking on a frantic affair with an old boyfriend. Elegant, privileged Sloane has sex with other people so her husband can get a thrill from watching.

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'Gross hypocrisy’: Nobel heavyweight to boycott Peter Handke ceremony [06 Dec 2019|12:08pm]

Peter Englund, former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and current member, refuses to celebrate the controversial 2019 literature laureate

Days before the Nobel laureate Peter Handke receives his award, a longstanding member of the Swedish Academy has announced that he will be boycotting the ceremonies because celebrating the Austrian writer’s win would be hypocritical.

Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Friday that he would not participate this year because “to celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be gross hypocrisy on my part”. Handke was set to give a press conference about his win at noon on Friday, with his laureate’s lecture due on Saturday. Formal presentation of his medal is timetabled for Tuesday.

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'Ignorant questions': Nobel winner Peter Handke refuses to address controversy [06 Dec 2019|05:03pm]

New literature laureate tells journalists ahead of prizegiving that it is the wrong moment to question his suppport for Slobodan Milošević

Nobel literature laureate Peter Handke brushed off questions about his support for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević at a press conference on Friday, telling gathered journalists that it was not the moment to answer “ignorant” queries.

The Austrian author’s Nobel prize win in October has been widely criticised by writers and politicians over his stance on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. A petition signed by almost 60,000 people is calling on the Nobel committee to revoke the award from the “apologist for the ‘butcher of Balkans’ Slobodan Milošević”. Handke spoke at Milošević’s funeral in 2006, calling him “a rather tragic man”.

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