Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare's Globe

Reviewed by Max Swinnerton

Last Friday, the U8 English cohort went on a trip to watch the latest production at The Globe: Antony and Cleopatra. Having studied the text in the Lower Eighth we were excited to be able to finally see Shakespeare’s words delivered onstage, and gain some extra A03* marks that had been lacking throughout the previous year. However, as we made the pilgrimage into the city, the group learned that this would be no ordinary production: the play was bilingual. The Roman characters would perform the original English and the Egyptians would act in British Sign Language. Even after Ms McLaughlin told us that we had standing tickets, and after reading a review by Time Out magazine which described it as ‘cumbersome’, we were ready to go in with an open mind. However, having now watched it and having had a week to digest, it’s safe to say the message behind the production fell flat.

Book of the Week

The Inheritors by William Golding

Recommended by Hari Collins

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico believed that all human speech started with poetry, by which he meant not that it was in metre or divided into lines but that it was richly metaphorical and symbolic. One of the finest achievements of William Golding’s The Inheritors is its exploration of how such a language could have worked.

 

The book is about a small group of Neanderthals, the last of their kind, and how they are gradually killed off by the ‘new people’: us, homo sapiens. The Neanderthals (who call themselves simply ‘the people’) do not communicate as we do, using regular sentences; instead, they ‘share pictures’, which involves a combination of ostensive actions, basic descriptions and telepathy. Thinking for them involves effort, but they have much more highly developed senses than we; in particular, their sense of smell is far in advance of ours.

Wu-Tang Forever!

Chamber Music about the Wu-Tang ( in 36 Pieces) by Will Ashon
Reviewed by Mr Kemp

This book is a sort of history and meditation on the influential hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan’s first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Annoyingly, it doesn’t work. Ashon doesn’t really seem to know exactly what he wants to do with the book. And it shows.

At once Chamber Music is a history of hip hop, a potted biography of RZA, GZA, ODB, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, and Masta Killa, a treatise on race relations and socio economic equality, as well as being a catalogue of Wu-Tang’s influences from Asian philosophy and martial arts films. As this sounds, it is a mess. The parts don’t cohere into a satisfying whole.

Book of the Week

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Recommended by Mr Kemp

I have been really impressed with this. But I’m not convinced that it’s the masterpiece that some people have been suggesting. This is the first graphic novel to be long-listed for the Booker Prize, and so it has perhaps predictably garnered quite a lot attention from the broadsheets. Indeed, my copy took about a month to arrive because the publishers hadn’t anticipated such a wide interest.

Book of the Week

1984 by George Orwell
Recommended by Kiyo Brandreth-Stroud

'Ignorance is strength' is the last line of the motto in the novel 1984, a dystopian novel written in 1949 by the author George Orwell, famous for his book, Animal Farm. This book is famous for its many underlying messages and is interesting on many levels.

The book was written just a few years after the horrors of World War Two and only twenty five years after the Russian revolution. The Labour party is in power and Orwell is in despair, driving him to write this book reflecting his inside emotions.

Book of the Week

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Recommended by Claudius Wheeler

This novel is based around early 20^th century Alabama, in Maycomb county. It was written by an author famous for this single novel called Harper Lee and is narrated by a girl named Scout, whose experiences relate to Lee’s childhood, having been brought up around this area at the same time the novel is set in. The title is taken from the wise words of her father, Atticus Finch: 'mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy… it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.'

The plot of the novel is Scout and her brother Jem living their everyday life in Maycomb county, while their father, who is a lawyer, ends up early in the novel defending a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a woman, in a court appeal.  As the word of this spreads across the racist county, Jem and Scout become subject to names at school that they can’t quite grasp but understand they are insults to their father.  Despite the pressure, they must restrain themselves from violence to these other children and people, although this is not always kept. The novel generally focuses on Scout, the younger sibling, through whom Lee portrays a vision of youth and humour in her actions as a six-year-old girl, but also keeps in the background the story of racial injustice. Scout has a childish perspective of this that can be ironic, which shows how such a serious matter is viewed through the eyes of an immature child, which also expresses the humour of Scout’s character as well.

Book of the Week

Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan
Recommended by Kian Kamshad

This book is the first in a trilogy about the Greek god Apollo, who has been cursed by Zeus to become a human called Lester Papadopoulos. He has to complete tasks for the first ‘demigod’ that claims him, and then he will become a god again. A demigod is the child of a god and a human. Apollo is ‘claimed’ by a demigod girl called Meg McCaffrey.

Book of the Week

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis
Recommended by Alex Powell

The Blind Side, the latest book by bestselling author Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short), focuses on the story of the Michael Oher, one of the players accredited with redefining the Left Tackle position in American Football.

Overall, the story is told fluently, as the reader is given insights into the real story of this man. It is a clever blend of both fiction and fact, as the story is based on real events.

Book of the Week

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré
Recommended by Andrew Spielmann

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 1974 spy novel by John Le Carré. It follows a retired senior intelligence officer, George Smiley, trying to uncover a mole at the highest level of British intelligence. He was forced out of ‘the Circus’ (the spy organisation he worked for) after an operation in Czechoslovakia, at the height of the Cold War, went horribly wrong.

However, one year into his retirement he finds out that there is a Soviet spy, who has been rooted deep into British intelligence for decades, working with Smiley’s nemesis in Moscow named Karla. The mole is one of the four most senior officers: Percy Alleline, Roy Bland, Toby Esterhase and Bill Haydon. Smiley investigates and figures out that the senior officers have all been tricked by Karla and the mole, so he sets a trap to catch the traitor.

Book of the Week

Suffragette by Emmeline Pankhurst
Recommended by Dr Duits. 

Pankhurst’s autobiography is an account of her lifelong quest for women to have the vote – from the moment she was first awakened to the gender inequalities surrounding her (she movingly recounts overhearing her father lament ‘pity she wasn’t born a lad’) up until the outbreak of 1914 (when the struggle for women’s votes was put on hold).

Book of the Week

The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

Recommended by Ayham Alkhader

After reading this book, you begin to question whether there are coincidences in life, or whether everything is actually interconnected by an otherworldly, omnipresent force that no one could ever know.

Then you remember that you've just read a novel, rather than undergoing a spiritual epiphany.

Book of the Week

Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Recommended by Rufus Law 

If you were to merely scratch the surface of this novel it would be hard to criticise you for thinking it was a shallow story of an even shallower man.

It’s a bitterly amusing tale of a particularly hedonistic character as he goes through the ups and downs of life, wealth and poverty and countless encounters with the fairer sex, meanwhile managing to maintain a varying state of intoxication. But underneath the meaningless sex and constant boozing is a depressing sadness and loneliness as the reader watches the antihero, Henry Chinaski, pass years of his life without making any meaningful relationships, while falling deeper and deeper into a destructive partnership with alcohol.

What I Read On My Holidays

Mr Kemp

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. 

Some sensational writing. Stories not entirely captivating: the relentless paranoid energy wears after a while. Not a beach read. Game playing gets dull.

Book of the Week

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Recommended by Louis Odgers 

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh is a satirical and comedic novel that follows the upper class of London and their never ending partying night life in the 1930s.

Book of the Week

Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes 
Recommended by Miss McLaren 

When we think of the Victorians, argues biographer Kathryn Hughes, we tend to think of them only from the neck up, like the US presidents on Mount Rushmore: their bodies, and the rest of their physicality (including how they smelled) don’t seem to exist, let alone matter.

But Hughes believes that Victorian bodies are important, and in Victorians Undone, she explains why.

Book of the Week

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Recommended by Nicholas Stanger

The novel follows the story of Wall Street banker Sherman McCoy (known to himself as a 'Master of the Universe') and his lover Maria with whom he is having an affair.

American Dreams ...

As David Garrow's new biography of Barack Obama ('impressive but gratuitously snarly': New York Times) hits the bookstores,  Amartya Varma considers the former president's own account of his early days, Dreams from my Father.

Everybody has origins - the more obscure, the harder it impacts you. Floundering rootless in a predominantly white society, Obama is compelled to look back to where he came from after hearing about the death of his estranged father who abandoned him as a child.

Book of the Week

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Juan Garcia-Rodenas tackles Tolstoy's rollicking historical novel. 

War and Peace is considered by many to be one of the greatest novels to have ever been written in any language. The story follows three Russian families, Bolkonsky, Rostov and Bezuhov, during the Napoleonic Wars, arguably one of the most interesting periods in history. The story begins in 1805 and ends later, after the Napoleonic era.

Book of the Week

The Arab of the Future, Volumes 1 and 2, by Riad Sattouf

Recommended by Mr Kemp

We have been here before. Nonfiction comics have for a long time now used simplistic cartoons to add something to the grimmer moments of the twentieth century. Art Spiegelman’s Maus does it for the Holocaust, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza document the turbulence of the Levant, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution is beautifully filigreed by Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis. 

The two volumes of Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future could therefore quite easily be an interesting but rehashed version of all these masterpieces, but it is credit to the book that it manages to be original and thoughtful, brutal and charming, and, most importantly, as good as all the others.

Paul Auster's Paragon of Post-Modernism

Max Hatter considers City of Glass by Paul Auster

The controlled yet chaotic storyline of the first installment of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy follows writer Daniel Quinn and his entrance into the thrilling world of detection.