From the archive: marcel proust: death of well-known french novelist
Originally published on 20 November 1922(From our Correspondent.)PARIS, SUNDAY.Marcel Proust, foremost of "young novelists" of France, died yesterday. He was fifty years old and had been in poor health from childhood. It is probable that he was as well known abroad, especially in Holland and England, where Marcel Proust Societies have recently been formed, as in Paris, where his work was enjoyed by a select minority. His style was difficult and obscure, and his intricate, exquisitely delicate meditations and analysis of emotions could never have appealed to the mass of readers. Outwardly and in his habits he was a strange being. Very pale, with burning black eyes, frail and short in stature, he lived like a hermit in his home, which was open to a few privileged friends, amongst precious furniture. Yet by fits and starts he loved to re-enter the fashionable "night-life" of Paris. His apartment was lined throughout with cork in an ineffectual attempt to keep out the uproar of the noisiest city in the world. Most of his best-known work was done after he reached the age of forty-five years. Of all idols and masters of present-day literature in France he is most likely to have won a place which time will not take away.Mr. Chesterton's PoemsTHE BALLAD OF ST. BARBARA AND OTHER VERSES. By G. K. Chesterton. London: Cecil Palmer. Pp. x. 83. 7s. 6d. net.In verse as in prose Mr. Chesterton is a brilliant, a versatile, a copious executant, he has perception, imagination, humour; he pours out of great vials his assurances of love and wrath. The reader, who, being a reader, has the merciful privilege of interrupting in the deluge when he likes, pauses at times to wonder why, with the use of so much decision, so little seems to be decided, and the conclusion he arrives at is that Mr. Chesterton out of date. Mr. ...

A love affair with a city like london demands much more than an air-kiss | simon jenkins
I know people who swear by the charms of Lagos or Grozny. For them, as me, a city is where friends are. Take note, Jan MorrisI once sat next to a woman at dinner who asked me where I lived. When I replied, London, she frowned and said, how simply ghastly for me. "It is an awful place, absolute hell. I hate going there, the people, the traffic, the tube, the dirt. You must be dying to escape."Stung by hearing my beloved home so abused I asked where she lived. Gloucestershire, she replied. "How ghastly," I said, "it is an awful place, absolute hell. I hate going there, the people, the horses, the filthy lanes, the boredom. You must be dying to escape." How extraordinarily rude, she said, and turned away for the rest of the evening.Hating cities is apparently fine, but hating the country is not permitted. Now I read that my old friend, the travel writer Jan Morris, has fallen out of love with London. She proclaimed so in last Saturday's Guardian: "When once it welcomed me like a dowager to her run-down stately home, now its greeting is more like the air-kiss of a tabloid celebrity." When Jan steps off the train at Euston, she said: "I find myself entering a different city altogether from the one that used to thrill me."I take comfort only in the knowledge that disagreeing with Jan is always exhilarating. We have disagreed everywhere, on the slopes of Snowdon, surrounded at Pen-y-Gwryd by mementos of the 1953 conquest of Everest (in which Jan took part). We have disagreed among the Italianate splendours of Portmeirion. We have disagreed on the banks of the swirling Dyfi and in Jan's stone eyrie upstream from Lloyd George's grave in Llanystumdwy. Disagreeing with her is more enjoyable than agreeing with anyone else. She has mastered the art of dissent, which is to clothe courtesy in laughter. ...

Ace of cakes: inside the world of charm city cakes
by Goldman, Duff and Willie GoldmanAce of Cakes: Inside the World of Charm City Cakes offers a closer look at the people who make the cakes and the show. Not only will one find out how Duff was able to start the bakery and turn it into a success, hire such creative people, but also how the television show came about. Each chapter introduces you to charming Charm City Cakes personnel and also the talented people “behind the scenes” producing the show. Throughout the book there are a number of tips and pictures to inspire us all to make a cake as unique as ourselves.- reviewed by Angela, Cornelius Branch, PLCMC (Source: Reader's Club's Latest)

Portobello books signs up herta müller's new novel
Independent publisher sees off competition in fierce auction for rights to Nobel winnerNobel laureate Herta Müller's new novel Atemschaukel, which follows the story of a German-Romanian teenager deported to a Ukrainian labour camp, will be published in the UK next year after independent press Portobello Books fought off five other publishers to acquire translation rights.Associate publisher Tasja Dorkofikis said she had been negotiating with Müller's German publisher Hanser before the author was named winner of the Nobel last month, only for the win to provoke a multi-publisher auction for her books as a flurry of interest in the German novelist kicked off.She has now bought UK rights in Atemschaukel, Müller's 1992 novel Der Fuchs War Damals Schon Der Jäger (The Fox Was the Hunter Even Then) and a selection of essays, as well as an as-yet-unwritten future title – potentially a memoir - by the author."We had a very long, protracted discussion with Hanser about buying this book [Atemschaukel, or Everything I Possess I Carry With Me] and a new book. It was all pre-Nobel," said Dorkofikis. "Then she won, so things changed a bit – many others stepped into the negotiations, but we held out ... There were five other publishers involved, auctions all over Europe – in Italy 10 publishers were involved."Müller's second new full length title, Dorkofikis said, "could be a memoir or a novel". The author's novels already draw extensively from her own life, her oppression under Ceausescu's Securitate and her subsequent exile in Berlin, where she now lives. Portobello Books hopes to publish Atemschaukel next September.Dorkofikis praised Müller's "masterful, poetic and precise" writing, which "without a word out of place ... truly illuminates and explains the human condition [and] forces readers to look at the dark and complicated realities of European history". ...

Uk lawyers fight to save nine-year-old boy from deportation to iran
Mother says family faces jail in Tehran for possessing extracts from Satanic Verses and criticising regime Lawyers for a nine-year-old boy set to be removed from the UK tomorrow are urgently trying to stop his deportation.The Iranian boy, known for legal reasons as Child M, has been locked up in Yarl's Wood in Bedfordshire, the UK's main immigration removal centre for women and families, since he was arrested with his mother and older brother in Manchester this week. They are due to be put on a flight to Iran tomorrow at 6.30pm.Child M's mother has been trying to claim asylum, saying her life is in danger if she returns to Iran because photocopied extracts of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses were found in her house and business.Richard Jones, Child M's lawyer, has given a new report to the UK border agency in which an independent expert testifies that the arrest warrant is genuine and states that the family would be in grave danger if sent back. If the agency discarded the report, the child's lawyers would make an urgent application to a high court judge for an injunction to prevent the deportation and allow the fresh evidence to be considered, he said.In April this year, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the children's commissioner for England, said children refused asylum should no longer be detained while awaiting deportation. He warned in a report that children found time spent in Yarl's Wood "like being in prison".Child M spent several weeks in Yarl's Wood last year and suffered serious physical and mental health problems as a result, said Jones.Speaking from Yarl's Wood yesterday, his mother, 48, who cannot be named for her own safety, said about 10 immigration officers came into her house at 8.15am on Monday and took her and her two sons, Child M and his brother, 19. She collapsed and was taken to hospital before going to Yarl's Wood in a wheelchair.She said her son was reacting very badly to the experience. "He wet himself last night. ...