Category Sách & Tri thức

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Lady C by Guy Cuthbertson review – how Lady Chatterley’s Lover rocked Britain

A history of the social and cultural impact of DH Lawrence’s novel shows how it inspired comedy as well as controversy

Not known for his humour, DH Lawrence thought of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a serious novel about the sacred nature of sex. But some of the activity between Connie and the gamekeeper Mellors is funny, either unintentionally (as in the scene where they garland each other’s naked bodies with flowers) or with a playful recognition of carnal absurdity: his penis is “farcical” and intercourse involves a “ridiculous bouncing of buttocks”. More comic still was the fallout from the book: customs officers seizing banned copies, high court jinks, innumerable skits and cartoons. As Guy Cuthbertson shows in his entertaining book, “It’s not a comic novel as such, but one way or another, it created laughter.”

On a steam railway in Devon, you can ride in a carriage called Lady Chatterley. Boots, blouses, thongs, earrings, pens, postcards and saris also bear her name and there have been endless jokey variations on the title: Lady Chatterley’s Pullover, Lady Chatterley’s Loofah, Lady Loverley’s Chatter and so on. Allusions to the novel turn up everywhere from lonely hearts ads to fancy dress parades. And as John Profumo and David Mellor discovered, if you were caught with your pants down in a sex scandal there’d be jokes about the new moral decrepitude that followed the unbanning of the book.

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Carol Rumens, poet and the Guardian’s poem of the week columnist, dies aged 81

The British poet, who also wrote plays, fiction and published poetry in translation, analysed almost 1,000 poems for her much-loved series

British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.

Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Explore the archive of Carol’s poem of the week columns here

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The Given World by Melissa Harrison review – a stunning tale of rural life for an era of ecological crisis

Eerie omens haunt this absorbing group portrait set over six months in an English village

Sitting stoned on a hill above his village, a young man muses on his place in the world. Connor is proud to have fenced pastures while his mates have been away at university. But it’s overwhelming to think of all their lives being equally real and urgent. Are they part of the same story or separate ones? A phrase comes to him from a book he hated at school: something about “the roar on the other side of silence”. In this fine, subtle and strange novel from one of the most probing writers of contemporary rural life, Melissa Harrison earns that nod to George Eliot, whose words she gives to an anxious and ecstatic labourer clutching a can of Fanta.

The Given World follows the inhabitants of one village in a river valley, a place “as old as anywhere”, for six months between the equinoxes of a year. The time is now, or an imminent future when the seasons seem to have “ceased their metronome”. At first, the central figure appears to be Clare, who knows each flagstone of the ancient priory that has been the centre of her life. The six months are her dying time, from diagnosis to last thoughts. But, in a way that pays tribute to the solitary Clare’s understanding of interconnectedness, the novel goes out from the priory to trace a web of lives. In the breezeblock bungalow next door, a desperate farmer tunes in at dawn to American evangelists on the radio. Like Saj the postman, we call at addresses where literary fiction rarely bothers to ring the bell.

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Iran and the Revolution by Homa Katouzian review – how the Islamic Republic was born

A landmark new account of the 1979 revolution sets current events in context

As Wordsworth found in Paris after 1789, revolutions are deeply enthralling. There is nothing so bold, so self-sacrificing, so brave, so cruel as a revolutionary crowd. What’s more, revolutions have shaped the modern world. The European Union has been transformed by the overthrow of Marxism-Leninism in eastern Europe, while the near-revolution in Tiananmen Square in 1989 feeds the neuroses of the Chinese Communist party to this day.

Yet in some ways it was a revolution 10 years earlier that has been even more formative for our times: the overthrow of the shah in Iran. That, indeed, was a genuine revolutionary archetype on the 1789 model: barricades in the streets, crowds armed with old hunting rifles and kitchen knives facing up to the tanks (British-made, naturally); palaces, barracks and secret police headquarters stormed and sacked, the uniforms of the shah’s supposed “Immortals” lying on the ground, abandoned in utter panic. I even came across the ultimate revolutionary image: the body of an unfortunate cop hanging from a lamp-post. Squeamishness back at the BBC in London meant the shot wasn’t used.

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Will human minds still be special in an age of AI?

We tend to think of intelligence like height – and imagine ourselves being overtaken. That misses the point

Until recently, we humans have been able to be smug about our abilities. No other animals play boardgames, write essays or prove mathematical theorems. But lately, progress in AI seems as though it might challenge our self-image as the smartest entities around. AI systems not only beat us at the most complicated games, but can also write polished prose and win medals in maths. Tech CEOs promise us that superhuman AI is just round the corner. So, in an age of AI, are human minds still special, or merely also-rans?

Talking about superhuman AI assumes that intelligence is a single scale. My parents used to mark the heights of my younger brother and me on the doorframe of our laundry. Each year he would get a little closer to me, until one year the unthinkable happened and he outgrew me (he’s now 6ft 3in). The current moment feels a bit like that, as we look at these new younger siblings with concern that they might overtake us.

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‘I wanted it to feel both Shakespearean and like Jay-Z’: debut author Sufiyaan Salam on masculinity, rap and meeting Stormzy

Bringing Manchester’s Curry Mile to vibrant life, the #Merky prize-winning author’s cross-genre work focuses on the lives and language of young British men. He discusses identity and inspiration

On a stretch of Manchester road known for kebabs, shisha smoke and restless energy, three young men drive towards a night that already feels like it’s slipping out of control. The premise of Wimmy Road Boyz, the debut novel by #Merky books new writers’ prize winner Sufiyaan Salam, is deceptively simple: “three boyz drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street”. What follows is anything but.

Salam’s novel unfolds over a single evening on the Curry Mile, that dense artery of Rusholme nightlife, where a white BMW carries Immy, Khan and Haris through a series of skirmishes, side quests and emotional unravellings. It’s a book about masculinity, violence and love, but also about language – how young British men speak, perform and fail to articulate what’s really going on inside their heads.

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‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think?

Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life?

The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals. It was a rude awakening.

Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”. “Now that was a very interesting idea,” Van Duerzen says, “but in practice it meant that people self-medicated, with alcohol and pot, and it was not a happy situation.” The residents were often very depressed or psychotic, and it was common to be woken up at night because someone was seeing things or had become suicidal. Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. “And this is what I realised wasn’t good enough,” she says. When people are experiencing a mental health crisis, they need help to make sense of what has happened to them, and to find their way to healing. “From that moment on I just knew: nobody’s doing this. I’m going to have to do it myself,” she says.

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Katie Kitamura: ‘Almost every writer changes my mind – that’s the point of reading’

The American author on the magic of Yasunari Kawabata, the hidden layers of Henry James and coming late to the genius of Muriel Spark

My earliest reading memory
I remember reading throughout my childhood, but it’s hard to identify my earliest memory of reading. In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to read. I do remember taking a copy of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons off the shelf when I was maybe 10 or 11 – far too young to be reading it. I was suitably scandalised and excited by it.

My favourite book growing up
I read a lot of Theodore Dreiser growing up, for reasons that are mysterious to me now. I don’t know how I came to him: he wasn’t assigned in school and no one in my family was reading his books. But his focus was on female characters and perhaps even then, that felt notable. I started with Sister Carrie, then read Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy, but Sister Carrie was the one I returned to again and again.

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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams audiobook review – the insider story that Meta tried to stifle

The author reads her account of her time as a senior executive at Facebook with a mixture of dark humour and astonishment at the working culture in which she finds herself

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir documenting her seven years working at Facebook opens, unexpectedly, with a shark attack. The New Zealander was 13 years old and swimming in the sea when the shark bit her torso and shook her from side to side. She lived to tell the tale, but her near-death experience awakened in her a desire to leave the world better than she found it.

Wynn-Williams went on to take a job at Facebook’s public policy department in 2011, having seen the potential of the platform as a global meeting place. But what she found was a senior staff high on power and untroubled by ethical concerns such as privacy or the dissemination of hate speech and misinformation. All were resistant to political interference and dedicated to rapid expansion, no matter the consequences, claims that Meta has called out of date and false. The author also encountered a working culture where employees enjoyed perks but had to be available around the clock – a situation that led to her responding to emails while in labour.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in April

Luke Kennard, Sophie Ratcliffe and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

This is a really good year for new fiction. I don’t think anyone writes about contemporary Englishness as astutely, mercilessly and affectionately as Claire Powell, and her latest novel, All In, puts her perfectly observed characters in the pressure cooker of an all-inclusive holiday. It’s a kind of meta-beach read, and I loved it.

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