A fitting salute to the Guardian's late parliamentary sketch writerI thought it unnecessary, and perhaps ethically dubious, to cover this book when its first edition came out in 2012; but now, following Simon Hoggart's death earlier this month, and the addition of a selection from a year's worth of parliamentary sketches from 2013, I think a salute is in order.For those of you new to this paper, Hoggart was, among other things, the Guardian's parliamentary sketch writer for 20 years, and this is a selection of his columns from 1993 to 2013. It is good that they have been reprinted in book form: I suspect that one of the casualties of the shift from print to digital versions of a newspaper is that columns such as parliamentary sketches can get overlooked by the casual browser.Hoggart's pieces could, in making politicians look ridiculous, be mistaken for frivolous exercises in name-calling, but they actually had deep foundations. He'd been a parliamentary correspondent in the 1970s, doing the kind of legwork that involved 5am sessions in the Tory whips' office that ended only "when blue curaçao was the only fluid left in the drinks cabinet".The important point to retrieve from this, which comes in his introduction, is that while Hoggart's sketches delighted because they seemed to have been composed by someone no more intimate with the world of parliament than any of us – and therefore as baffled, amused or appalled by its conventions, or ideas of acceptable language and... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
Hodder Children's Books has bought an epic science fiction teen novel from Sif Sigmarsdottir, who is a bestselling author in her native Iceland and is now writing in the English language for the first time. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2016-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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John Murray is to publish Thing Explainer, the follow-up to Randall Munroe’s What If? In Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, Munroe uses a series of diagrams to show how a variety of things, from a nuclear bomb to a biro, work. He will use just the drawings and a vocabulary of... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-05-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A fitting salute to the Guardian's late parliamentary sketch writerI thought it unnecessary, and perhaps ethically dubious, to cover this book when its first edition came out in 2012; but now, following Simon Hoggart's death earlier this month, and the addition of a selection from a year's worth... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2014-01-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Favorites among year's six Booker Prize finalists — which "shows the English language novel to be a form of world literature" — are Jim Crace and Eleanor Catton. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-09-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Oxford University Press will shortly launch a consultation over jobs in its English Language... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-03-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Razorbill, the teenage imprint of Penguin Children's, has done the first English language... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-09-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Thu, 27/10/2011 - 09:00 The Publishers Association's international conference will focus on issues such as export sales and the growth of the English language, with speakers to include Barnes and Noble vice-president of digital content Theresa... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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