The Fifth Estate blog has been down for a bit: apologies. We’re just tidying up, so if you find any bugs, please let us know.
In 2008, Marcus du Sautoy succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, which means he’s been officially tasked with ‘making maths fun’ and accessible.
As his publishers, we wanted to use the opportunities for interaction and edutainment integral to Marcus’ writing and so, to celebrate Marcus du Sautoy’s book The Number Mysteries, we’re publishing an educational app, which includes extracts from the ‘game strategy’ chapter of the book, fun videos and an interactive game, Moley.
Watch the video:
On Friday morning HarperCollins HQ was descended upon by a bunch of eager political bloggers who had been invited to a very special breakfast.
As well as getting to hear Lord Mandelson speak for near enough 90 minutes, the bloggers were also given copies of source material from 1987 – 1997 that was used in the process of writing the book.
Most of the Guardian readers or digital publishing enthusiasts among you will already have enjoyed Marcus’ article on books, enhanced ebooks and apps published last weekend in the Guardian Review.
Well, today is publication day for Marcus’ very exciting own enhanced book project The Number Mysteries.
‘Mind-bending, fascinating and useful too. Maths didn’t used to be this much fun.’
- Alan Davies
We are all taught how fundamental maths is to the world we live in. But did you know that Wayne Rooney solves a quadratic equation every time he connects with a cross to put the ball in the back of the net? That we use prime numbers when we shop on the Internet? Or that you can win $1 million just by solving one of the five puzzles in The Num8er My5teries?
As well as containing great writing from the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, the book is sprinkled with QR codes that will send you to various online web pages chosen by the author, and references to downloadable additional material to further your understanding of the maths in the book.
Click here to continue reading about the book, as well as to learn more about the iPhone app especially created to accompany it, the QR codes contained within, and the maths puzzles you can download, print out and play with…
Tomorrow we are publishing Anjali Joseph’s debut novel Saraswati Park.
Anjali was recently chosen as one of the Telegraph’s Top 20 novelists under 40, a great accolade for a first time novelist.
The book takes place over the course of a year and tracks the city of Bombay through the changing seasons. In this podcast she is interviewed by Fourth Estate editor Mark Richards.
Click here to listen to Anjali Joseph.
Another Fourth Estate writer on the Telegraph list is Rana Dasgupta, author of Solo and Tokyo Cancelled.
The fallout was cataclysmic, and almost instantaneous. The headlines were devastating, revealing not only greed, but small-mindedness. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was found to have claimed for various domestic items, including pornographic films viewed by her husband; the Tory MP Douglas Hogg claimed for the expense of cleaning the moat at his country house; Frank Cook, a Labour backbencher, tried to claim back £5 he had donated at a Battle of Britain memorial service.
And then there was the duck house. The “Stockholm” model, which Sir Peter Viggers bought in 2006 for £1,645, was 5ft high and positioned on a floating island. This was only part of the £30,000 Sir Peter claimed towards gardening at his home, including £500 for manure. He was never actually reimbursed for the duck home, as a Commons official wrote “not allowable” beside the claim. “I paid for it myself and in fact it was never liked by the ducks,” he said. But it was the thought that counted.
Part One
There was the Rump Parliament (1649) and the Long Parliament (1640), the Mad Parliament (1258) and, quite simply, the Bad Parliament (1377). But what to call the 54th parliament, which seemed so very long, so mad and, in many ways, so very bad? This will be, for ever, the Duck House Parliament. Little did Sir Peter Viggers imagine, when he ordered an obscure and expensive item of furniture for his pond, that he would be creating a grim leitmotif for an era of scandal that inflicted such damage on the institution he had served for 36 years. In a cruel twist, the wretched ducks did not even like their new house, which Sir Peter tried to include in his parliamentary expenses. They refused to live in it.
The Parliament ushered into being by the 2005 election and put out of its misery in April 2010, was one of astonishing turbulence, buffeted by scandal, economic meltdown and political acrimony. All the major parties changed leader: the Liberal Democrats twice. The Speaker was forced out of office for the first time since 1695. At the end of the Parliament, a remarkable 149 MPs stood down, including 100 Labour members and 35 Tories.
2010 is the centenary of the birth of probably the greatest traveler, travel writer and travel photographers of the last century, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003). Wilfred Thesiger in Africa is published to coincide with a major centenary exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, which examines his lifelong relationship with Africa for the first time.
The book contains a new essay on Thesiger’s travels in Africa by his friend and biographer Alexander Maitland, as well as several shorter pieces; on Thesiger’s influence on a younger generation of explorers (Benedict Allen); a critical approach to his photography (Edwards); his collection of artifacts (Coote), and his archive in Oxford (Jones and Morton). These essays are accompanied by around 200 of Thesiger’s African photographs, most of them published for the first time.
Probably best known for his two extraordinary journeys across the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter, the vast arid desert of southern Arabia immortalised in Arabian Sands (1959), now considered a classic work of travel writing, Thesiger’s haunting descriptions of the shifting sands and striking accompanying photographs have stirred many readers from their armchairs in the intervening years. But Arabia, and later his experiences living among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, were interludes in a long life, the greater part of which was spent living and travelling in East and North Africa.
Born in 1910 in Addis Ababa, where his father was the British Minister in charge of the Legation, Wilfred Thesiger spent his boyhood in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and he retained a lifelong affinity with the country and continent of his birth. In 1930, while still studying at Oxford, he attended the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, the only witness of the spectacle to be sent a personal invitation; and afterwards he undertook his first significant expedition, traversing the dangerous and unexplored Sultanate of Aussa to locate the place where the Awash River ended. Administrative postings in the Sudan followed, and later journeys through the Tibesti Mountains in Chad and the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. When Mussolini’s Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, Thesiger experienced this as a personal assault, and he served under Wingate with local ‘Patriot’ fighters to liberate the country during the Second World War, being awarded the DSO for his part in the capture of Agibar fort. Following his celebrated travels in Arabia and Iraq during the late 1940s and 1950s, Thesiger returned to Ethiopia in 1959, visiting the remarkable rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and thereafter he based himself for much of each year in East Africa. By the late 1970s he had settled permanently in northern Kenya, living among a close-knit group of the pastoral Samburu whom he considered his adoptive ‘family’. Throughout this time Thesiger was taking photographs, initially with an old box-camera inherited from his father, and subsequently with his trusted Leica, which he upgraded at regular intervals but which always travelled with him.
As editors of this book and the exhibition it accompanies, we have favoured an approach other than a survey of ‘highlights’, which has in any case been done before, notably at the Pitt Rivers Museum in its first major exhibition of Thesiger’s work in 1993, and by Thesiger himself in his later books such as Desert, Marsh and Mountain and Visions of a Nomad. Instead, the book is the first to explore Thesiger’s lifelong relationship with Africa. Thesiger’s very first published photographs were taken in Africa, appearing with a series of articles about his 1933–4 Awash expedition, and his photographs accompanied his writings throughout his life. Surprisingly, however, the African pictures were never reproduced with the same zeal as his photographs of Arabia and Asia, less appealing to publishers if not to his readers. Thesiger wrote about Africa and its importance to him, notably in his autobiography The Life of My Choice (1987), but the visual evidence to a large extent remained unseen. The focus on Africa has therefore allowed us to explore a lesser-known area of his photography and for the first time to examine it in detail. The photographs have been chosen as representative of many of the themes in his work, but they are undoubtedly also some of his finest and most striking images. Drawn from over 17,000 negatives, or more than two-fifths of his entire photographic output, they span the greater part of his life and show people and places in Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, Tanzania and Kenya; the last picture in our selection was taken near his home in Maralal in Kenya in 1983.
‘I am certain that the first nine years of my life have influenced everything that followed,’ Wilfred Thesiger wrote in 1994, the opening line of his memoir My Kenya Days. As he saw it, Africa set his life on its course and it is therefore fitting that it should provide the focus for a centenary volume. From his birth in Abyssinia to his final years spent in Kenya, Africa provided more than bookends to a life, however, and Thesiger saw it very much as his spiritual home, declaring even that he hoped to end his days there. A lifetime’s engagement with the continent provides the necessary biographical context and makes possible a fresh examination of his importance as an explorer, collector and photographer.
Taken over five decades, the African pictures also document Thesiger’s development as a photographer, in particular as a portraitist. ‘Ever since my time in Northern Darfur,’ he wrote, ‘it has been people, not places, not hunting, not even exploration that have mattered to me most.’ Although known to a large extent for his often romantic images of landscape, Thesiger saw these as secondary, ‘a setting for my portraits of the people.’ Appropriately for an ethnographic museum, therefore, the exhibition is also a celebration of the men and women depicted and the diverse cultures which they represent. From the Afar, Konso and Boran of Ethiopia, the Nuer and Dinka of Sudan, the Berbers of Morocco, and the Samburu and Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, ‘Wilfred Thesiger in Africa’ offers glimpses of some of the most fascinating cultures and places on the African continent, seen through the lens of one of its most celebrated observers.
Philip N. Grover and Christopher Morton
Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
June 2010
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition continues at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, until 5 June 2011
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa
Edited by Christopher Morton and Philip N. Grover
With contributions by Alexander Maitland, Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Allen, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Philip N. Grover, Schuyler Jones and Christopher Morton.
I first visited the Maltese islands in the summer of my third birthday. I don’t actually remember the visit, instead my prompt is an old cine camera film of a small me walking off Gozo ferry, holding hands with my mum and waving at my dad.
My mum was born in Malta, to a Maltese mother and an English father and I grew up spending my summer holidays on the island (locals call it The Rock). We’d visit every summer, taking presents for our vast extended family. We were very much the English relatives, gifting huge bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and brightly coloured plastic beads and bracelets. We’d spend the first few days visiting relative after relative and each time my dad would be given Cisk lager in a bottle and I’d drink ice cold Kinnie (a Maltese soft drink made from a blend of oranges and aromatic herbs) through a straw.
Reading Groups continue to bring people together to discuss and enjoy literature.
We are delighted to launch the UNCOVER FIRST campaign together with The Reading Agency and UK Libraries which will promote six novels, perfect for Reading Groups, over a period of six months.
Our campaign promotes and supports Reading Groups by highlighting six titles perfect for your Reading Group. So if you’ve stumbled across this page and aren’t a UK library – we don’t mind. Download our reading group notes and enjoy! It’s your chance to UNCOVER FIRST some of these amazing titles.
Reading notes for All the Living
Reading notes for Brixton Beach
Reading notes for The Elephant Keeper
Reading notes for The Lace Reader
I bridge the gap between old and new. Archaic and revolutionary. Utopia and dystopia. Perhaps that’s a step too far but, the point remains, I juggle the opposition of fine press publishing and the study and implementation of the the most up to date digital publishing technologies.
So, in a market where some people are, rather misguidedly, predicting the end of the printed book as we know it, is there still a place for fine press publishing?
It’s expensive to produce fine press books. It’s time consuming and fiddly, it’s wrought with issues and only a handful of people have the expertise to do it.
This week is Independent Booksellers Week - a perfect time to pop into your local independent bookshop and join the celebrations. There are activities running up and down the country - you may just find a local author helping out behind the till, storytelling for children or special offers on a range of fantastic books. Head over to your local shop and show your support!
To state the obvious, book publishing – content publishing – is on the cusp of a huge transition now made real by the arrival of the iPad, but which has been long in the coming. The more I talk to people in and out of our industry, the clearer it is that we do not yet have the alchemists who can take our content and apply it to the iPad technology and turn it into gold.
As a result, we rightly spend a great deal of time looking at those who have been through this transition already to learn from their mistakes.
When we look to other industries we ordinarily look to those with the closest affinity regarding content and consumer, like the music, magazine or newspaper industry. The explicit message being that they are best placed to teach us the mistakes that they made so that we don’t make them for ourselves. We also spend a lot of time looking at each other and either copying or ruing the fact that we were not the first to the market. The Nick Cave and Jamie Oliver apps are just two high-profile examples.
In writing a book called The Rational Optimist, I’ve encountered a paradox. Most people are too optimistic about their own lives. They think they will earn more, stay married longer and be happier than the average. But most people are too pessimistic about the future of the human race. They think the economy will tank, new technology will bring dangers, pollution will worsen, population will explode and the climate will deteriorate. Let’s call it the Paradox of Positive Pessimism.
What is more, the intellectual and political establishment does its utmost to deepen the paradox. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, people who get cancer or who lose their job are often lectured on the need for positive thinking. If you do not regard your cancer as a ‘gift’ or stay happy despite your unemployment, you are almost judged to be the author of your own misfortune. Meanwhile, princes, prime ministers, physicists and priests all tell us that climate catastrophe is all but inevitable within our lifetimes, that only Antarctica will be habitable by the end of the century and that only flat-earthers believe otherwise. For climate substitute swine flu, BSE, famine, GM crops, mobile phone radiation, Y2K computer bugs, obesity, pensions, social networking sites – according to fashion.
So we should each be positive, but we are all doomed.
Many of the books on WWII focus on single battles and campaigns, or treat it in terms of diplomacy, economics and grand strategy. MORAL COMBAT tries to do something radically different. I did not think I could write this book until I had reached an age, and experience, which made me more sensitive to the choices made at the time, for when one is younger there is an inevitable rush to judgement.
The book is about clashing fundamental values, which then had to be mediated through a more conventional policy optic, in which morality often seemed to have had little to do with it. These were not decisions made at the leisurely pace of a university philosophy seminar, but by men under enormous hourly pressures that visibly aged them in a remarkably rapid time.
At what point do you abandon diplomatic compromise with predatory dictatorships, and what tactics can be legitimately used to combat them, including in this case a western democratic alliance with a Soviet totalitarian dictatorship as evil as Nazism? How were entire societies galvanized for total war? Once the conflict had begun in earnest, what considerations guided politicians and commanders as they despatched men into battle, on land, at sea and in the air? What sort of moral considerations operated on the world’s battlefields, and in the minds of men exposed to the stresses of combat?
For anyone who’s wanted to live the dream but never had the nerve to try.
It was a derelict smallholding so high up in the Black Mountains of Wales it was routinely lost in cloud. But to Antony Woodward, Tair-Ffynnon was the most beautiful place in the world. Continue reading for Antony’s Ten tips for anyone planning a mountain garden or go to www.gardenintheclouds.com to find out more…
- Ask yourself: are you sure you want to do this? Few dwellings in Britain sit above the 1200 foot contour, and for good reason: we’re 45-minutes from the nearest pint of milk or beer and deliveries seldom make it before the third attempt. We sit for days in dense hill fog while valley neighbours enjoy sunshine. Gales strip paint from the walls and at night the sound can vary between an organ pipe moan and an animal shriek.
- You can only grow what will grow, which isn’t much compared to lowland gardens. Learn to love the simple: gates framing views, dry stone walls, wild flower meadows, old farm implements rusting in field corners. Because, like it or not, these will be your best garden features.
Matt Ridley’s new book The Rational Optimist is published later this month in the UK and is beginning to create much discussion about what our future world could look like and how we will get there. Matt outlined his arguments in an interview this week on WNYC in the US – you can watch the interview here.
Coming: October 2010
That is all.
Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough
when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
- Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags, 1942
My first involvement with gardening was aged seven. I am sitting in the back of my mother’s car (Austin 1300 Countryman, cream, woodeffect trim). She’s at the wheel; my father’s in the passenger seat, my older brother Jonathan is in the back with me. We’ve pulled off a country road alongside some iron railings. Through the railings a garden can be seen leading back, via a wide lawn, to a handsome stone-built villa. Wiltshire probably; possibly Gloucestershire or Somerset.
‘Antony’—my mother only used my full Christian name when she was serious—‘I won’t ask you again. Get out of the car.’
‘No.’
‘Get—out—of—the—car.’
‘Why? Why me?’
‘The more you sit here arguing, the longer we’re going to be.’
‘Why can’t Jonny do it?’
‘You’re smaller than he is. Anyway, it’s your turn.’
‘What if someone comes? What if the people come back?’
‘They won’t come back.’
‘But what if they do?’
‘I must say, I’m not sure this is wise,’ says my father. ‘It’s breaking the law.’
‘Don’t be so feeble, Peter. How could anyone mind? If the child got on with it, we could all be on our way home by now.’
‘Exactly. It’s breaking the—’
‘Be quiet, Antony.’
‘What if someone does come?’ says my father.
‘He just runs for it, of course.’ She turns to me. ‘You can come back through the gate if you want. Look,’ she adopts a more conciliatory tone, ‘it won’t take a second. You’ll be back here before you know it, and I’ll cook sausages for tea.’
‘The fence is too high. I’ll never get over.’
‘It does look high, Liza. I really do think—’ says my father.
‘Fiddlesticks. Really Peter, you’re as bad as the children.’
‘It’s not fair … where’s the bloody thing again?’
‘Don’t use bad language. It’s the helianthemum. Over there under the wall, with the small white flowers. In that raised bed. On the left.’
From the car there is a view through the wrought-iron gate, down a short, flag-stoned path onto the lawn. Diagonally across this is the raised bed, about eighty yards away.
‘The white thing by the big red bush?’
‘Yes. Now get a move on. And remember: pull downwards so a piece of the stalk comes with it.’
Out now… An app with a difference
The new book by Nicola Barker, author of the Booker short-listed Darkmans, was published last Thursday. Burley Cross Postbox Theft, is brilliant, startlingly witty, and only occasionally disturbing:
Reading other people’s letters is always a guilty pleasure. But for two West Yorkshire policemen – contemplating a cache of 26 undelivered missives, retrieved from a back alley behind the hairdresser’s in Skipton – it’s also a job of work. The quaint moorside village of Burley Cross has been plunged into turmoil by the theft of the contents of its postbox, and when PC Roger Topping takes over the case, which his higher-ranking schoolmate Sergeant Laurence Everill has so far failed to crack, his expectations of success are not high.
We knew that this book was something very special, and so we wanted to do something special for it. Since the book is about a series of missing letters, we thought it’d be good if we could have fun with it, and serialise the letters in some way.
The notion of foods being gender-specific may seem absurd but the French, who regard bread as masculine and carrot as feminine, have known this for years. Now this division has crossed the Channel. In Britain, comestibles increasingly separate themselves into girls’ food and chaps’ food. Let me explain.
While I am quite partial to Brie, grapes and cranberries, when combined in a sandwich they lose their appeal. The reason is that the Brie, cranberry and grape sandwich, a stalwart among Marks & Spencer’s lunch offerings, is a classic example of girls’ food. Very few men would buy such an innocuous, clean and (apparently) healthy snack. However, men see nothing wrong with a Cheddar and Branston sandwich. This may seem odd since it also contains cheese and fruit (of a sort). Fortunately, its robust assault on the palate redeems this combination from any suspicion of effeminacy.
Last Sunday at age 82, Alan Sillitoe passed away. A great literary talent, and one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ of British fiction, Sillitoe wrote many novels and works of poetry. He was perhaps best known for his critically acclaimed debut, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
This interview was conducted for the PS Section of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Everyone Getting Blindo
Travis Elborough talks to Alan Sillitoe
You’ve written that when you were in Majorca, reading the clear prose of De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium Eater aloud helped you to improve and refine your own style. What other works, do you feel, informed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning?
It was a clarity of English I was after. I read the Bible all the while I was writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but I was reading so much then. It’s very difficult to put your finger on it. Camus, Sartre, Salinger, of course, Mailer and all the great Americans, but one finally disregarded all that and found one’s own voice.
Recently Press Books editor Michael Upchurch interviewed Fergal Keane on his new book Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944.
What makes the most successful sports stars rise above the competition? In his new book, Bounce, award-winning Times columnist (and Fourth Estate author) Matthew Syed reveals their secrets.
‘I don’t know anyone who can run a marathon as fast as you’. The pause was unforgettable, and I lowered my head with bashfully pride. ‘And is so fat.’
There were 12 of us sat in the Red Lion pub on Whitehall, the first time we had got together since leaving school, and I had just finished my first London marathon. I had never been a distinguished athlete, and since I had come to London had given in to the inevitable girth of office life. As a teenager I had grown too quickly for my muscles to take hold of my body and had, in large part, been reduced to watching the sports I wished I could play from the sideline. While my friends competed against one another, I took to running in the hills above our school, at first as a kind of rebellion against an order I could not take part in, but later an act of liberation from the white lines that marked out the boundaries of convention that led to the lives our parents had.
