1am. Baldwin can sense the moon reaching its zenith. Time you were gone . Behind him, he can hear Brunhilde convulsed in another fit of string-theory coughing. She can hardly eat. He wrinkles his nose and shambles into the entrance tunnel. The night is the colour and texture of mercury; a sickly brightness hangs over the bank. Baldwin sniffs the air. Faint echoes of a vixen; a harem of deer somewhere up the barely perceptible breeze; frogs; and there – the crunch of freshly turned earth. And something else. Something he can’t place. He shrugs. The forest is full of strangeness. He doesn’t hear the bullet that kills him. Fired from 100 yards away across the water with a sinuous pfft , it runs straight through his left temple and out of his neck, tearing his spinal cord from his spine. If you're reading this clumsy piece of prose, the chances are you've already made up your mind one way or another. For those who care - and there are plenty who don't - the battle lines in t ...

Why bother? Why would you even try to adapt Jane Eyre into a dramatic production? The novel is an almost perfect period piece preserving the architecture of a specific moment in English prose, whose effect largely depends on the possibilities of the first person narrator’s voice and the unimaginable ugliness of its two central characters. You may as well adapt it into a milkshake.But still directors try, drawn in by the sheer gravitational force of the plot and the protagonists. You can see their point, on a basic level: the core of Jane Eyre is powerfully theatrical. For those who have not read the book, here is a brief, teasing summary: a young, orphaned governess is engaged to look after a French child at a sulking hall somewhere in the north Midlands. She is “plain”, a typically rubescent Victorian euphemism for “ugly”. So, fortunately, is the master of Thornfield Hall, Edward Rochester, “more remarkable for character than beauty”. They get along famously, exce ...

The hang is not a drum. It is a hang. Do not call it a drum. This misnomer creates "a ripple effect of misinformation that leads to damaged instruments, physical injury and mental and emotional turbulence," according to the Hangbauhaus of Berne. It might look to your untutored eyes like a steel drum with a semi-sentient dustbin somewhere in its recent genealogy, but this could not be less accurate. The hang, plural hanghang , was born with the 21st century in Switzerland, and derives its name from a dialect word for "hand". It is not made of steel, but rather of a special rarefaction of steel called pang, which has healing properties. Hanghang are not really instruments at all, but "sound sculptures", "eluding the conventional definition of the musical instrument", and hence they are rare, almost impossible to replicate, and you can only buy them through handwritten letters to their sculptors. In fact the makers of the hang, Felix Rohner and Sa ...

A strange sound has been echoing through the streets of the Arab world’s capitals of late. It is the awful chinking of a handful of coins being shaken in a begging bowl the size of a nation. Delegations from Egypt, the largest Arab country and the supreme petri dish of political Islam in the wake of the Arab Spring, have been touring their neighbours’ finance ministries furiously in an increasingly desperate appeal for loans.First they canvassed the obvious candidates. Qatar, the Armani-suited uncle with the unsmiling eyes, proved obliging at first, lending $2.5 billion in December. Egypt promptly spent this with unhealthy alacrity and went back for more. It did not meet with much sympathy (STOP PRESS: Qatar has since announced an emergency loan of $3 billion, either in the form of treasury bonds or bank deposits). When Doha dried up, Egypt turned to less likely sources. Flush with hydrocarbon dollars and reeling from the news that its GDP has more than doubled in the last y ...

- “Do you not realise that you too could create all these things in a sense?" - “And what sense is that?” he said. - “It’s not difficult,” I said. “You could do it anywhere you like and as quickly as you like – quickest, I suppose, if you took a looking-glass and held it up all around you. You could make the sun in an instant, and everything in the sky; the earth in an instant, yourself in an instant, and all the other animals and tools and plants and all the other things we were just talking about.” - “Oh, sure,” he said, “as they appear – but not as they really are.” Plato, Republic X 596d-e The best insults come back as banners. “Tory” originally meant outlaw or rebel – coined from the Irish word for “pursue” – until it became a badge of honour for the Royalist faction in Parliament under Charles II. The “Impressionist” movement took its name from a sneer by the art critic and satirist Louis Leroy, who lambasted Monet’s Impre ...

No. No, I think we can safely say that it isn't. Sorry. But that got your attention, didn't it? And now that I've got it, let me play with it a while. Because - be honest - a small part of you really wants the headline to be true. It's the same part of you that watches natural disasters and urges the death toll higher. The part that wants to see News International dismantled, pulverised and incinerated, right down to the last cardboard packet of paperclips. The part that catches sight of Oedipus rushing distraught to the scene of his wife-mother's suicide and clamours DO IT DO IT DO IT doitdoitdoitdoit WWHEEEYY!!! "All the amazing and horrifying things that make us human: firing rockets at the moon, eating 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes, and hacking into the answerphones of war widows" Now for the controversial bit: this ugly little smear in your psychological makeup is neither unnatural nor ignoble. In fact, it's essential. The do-it do-it do-it complex (DDDC) - not simple Schad ...

Thank God for Rupert Murdoch. Without the media Mongol - “mogul” doesn’t even come close to describing a man who counts The Times, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal among his dominions - journalism would be the most boring subject a journalist could choose to write about. But Murdoch has made the media, well, sexy. Controversial, at any rate. However much we complain about empires, we love the drama that attends them; and News International entertains as much as any of the stories its papers cover. Take this latest one, for example: News International sponsors the Visiting Professorship of Media at Oxford, which has brought the likes of Armando Ianucci and Paul Gambaccini to lecture here in the past. And what will 2011’s Visiting Professor talk about? Why, Rupert Murdoch, with the subtitle: “How one man became the dominant force in the British media’s coverage of sport. Does that mean he controls sport itself?” It is as though a newly appointed Poet Laureate were to ...

Student music journalism is a rhinestone trade. The rhinestone - you’re more likely to hear it called diamante in Britain - was devised by an Alsace jewelsmith called Georg Friedrich Strass in the late 18th century as a cheap kind of ersatz diamond. You take glass, lacquer its bottom side with a thin layer of reflective metal, and presto, you have the dream of a precious stone. Why would anybody wear something so obviously fake? Because you do not wear a rhinestone for itself. You wear it as a way of saying ‘one day, I will wear real diamonds.’ The rhinestone is a placeholder for future success. Nobody knows this better than an American musician. Since the 1950s, everybody from Elvis to Dolly Parton has sported the rhinestone as a symbol of aspiration. Eventually, it became prized in its own right as a metaphor for the music business itself: a master illusionist’s spell of change. The kind of spell that could make a kitchen girl a princess for an evening. Under the soft magic ...

12.30pm, March 7th 2010 Between Godstow and North Oxford “Feel free to listen to your music if you want.” “It’s OK.” “No, really, mate, I don’t mind.” “It’s fine; I was just going through a wall back there, that’s all.” I glared at the back of my training partner’s running vest. Anything rather than concentrate on the feeling in the backs of my thighs. You patronising Irish bastard, I thought, do you really think you’re in control here? We pounded on in silence through a gloriously sunny morning, oblivious to the light on the canal, to the couples on their Sunday strolls, and above all to the fun runners we occasionally passed. Then, grinning with my teeth gritted together, I quickened my pace and passed him. Two miles to go - what have you got for me? Past the bridge to St Edward’s School, I was leading by three or four yards. Beyond another bridge, a bridge that didn’t even have a name or a purpose except to mark out the distance between ...