Too far left; it crosses the front of the hole and continues on, leaving him with a six-foot tester coming back. Over to Bubba. On 16, Mickelson’s tee shot lands at the back of the green, staying on the upper tier. He’ll not make birdie from there, unless something stupendously stupid occurs. On 18, Harrington ends with a double bogey, missing a short putt, the final indignity. He ends the day on -4. So many chances, so many chances. On 17, Oosthuizen’s ball has come back out onto the fairway, but he doesn’t take advantage of the lucky break, finding the bunker front right of the green with his second. Bubba is in the trees, but in a clearance, and decides to go for the green with a wedge. And he finds it! Miles from the pin, but after that drive, he’d have taken that every time!
A birdie for Hanson on 15, but surely it’s too little, too late: he’s -7. Mickelson follows him in, to move to -8. Still fighting, but only just. Mind you, on 17, Bubba slices a wayward drive miles left – and then Oosthuizen hits a similarly hopeless slice to the right! Not sure where either ball has landed yet, but both are in the trees it would seem. Here comes pressure! This Masters just gets better and better!
Harrington’s approach to 18 ends in a bunker at the front of the green. Symbolic of his day; he’s come up just short, time and time again. On 16, Oosthuizen hits a solid birdie effort from 15 feet, but it’s always missing left on the low side. Bubba makes no mistake, however, and crashes in his birdie putt. He hares after it before it drops, high on life. He’s now carded four birdies on the spin, and is joint leader with Oosthuizen at -10. This is intense, and as good as golf gets.
Bubba hits his tee shot at 16 to eight feet. It’s a wonderful shot under the most intense pressure. He’s been the most consistent player of the week. Is he just timing his run perfectly? Oosthuizen puts his tee shot into the centre of the green, consolidating his one-shot lead; the ball topples down the ridge, some way behind Bubba’s ball, but with a half-chance for a long birdie putt that would be a real kick in his rival’s teeth.
Westwood is now the clubhouse leader at -8. There are now only two people ahead of him: Oosthuizen and Bubba. That’s because on 16, Kuchar dinks a delicate, nay pretty, chip down the green from his awkward position to the right. He slowly guides it to the top of a ridge, where it breaks sharp left and speeds up. He leaves himself with a 12 footer for par, the best he could do. It’s an amazing shot. But not enough to save his par, as he can’t knock in the snaky, gossamer putt. He’s back to -8.
Bubba prods his uphill eagle putt on 15 in a very ginger fashion. He’ll need to make the tricky birdie putt he’s left himself, because Oosthuizen makes his, regaining the sole leadership at -10. Watson does birdie, though: it’s his third on the bounce, and he’s -9. This is awesome golf. Speaking of which, up on 18, Westwood ends with a birdie, clipping his approach to eight feet past the pin, and rolling it straight in. He punches the air, knowing he’s probably not quite done enough – but then again, he’s far enough up the leaderboard to retain a reasonable chance!
Oosthuizen pushes his approach to 15 wide of the bunker to the right of the green. That’s not great. Bubba, however, sends an 8-iron to the centre of the green, 20 feet from the pin for eagle. On 16, the super-hot Kuchar is spooked by the water, and sends his tee shot miles wide right, just off the green. That will be quite a test, with the hole near the water, near the kink of the green. Back on 15, Oosthuizen manages to manufacture a bump just onto the green. Not ideal, but not a disaster, and about the best he could have done from there. He’s left with a 12-foot tester. On 18, Poulter three putts, ending the day on -5. Typical Masters drama, right here, right now.
Kuchar taps in his eagle putt, and joins Oosthuizen in the lead. On 18, Poulter’s approach reaches the back left of the green. The pin’s in it’s usual Sunday position: think Sandy Lyle. On 15, Bubba cracks a ludicrously long drive straight down the middle. And so does Oosthuizen.
A poor chip and two putts for Peter Hanson, whose challenge is all over, I’d suggest, given the defeated angle of his shoulders. Bye! On 15, Kuchar is surely certain of a birdie, as he nearly creams his second into the cup for a second albatross of the day! It was inches away. That would have been truly preposterous, Gene Sarazen cubed. The ball’s not far from the pin, that’s an almost certain eagle.
source: guardian.co.uk
Several others were seriously injured in the attack and have been taken to hospital. The death toll could be higher, with one official, Abubakar Zakari Adamu, telling the AP news agency 38 had died. A bomb later exploded in the central city of Jos, injuring several people. The blasts in Kaduna, which caused extensive damage, happened near restaurants, a hotel and two churches.
Religious conflict The area has been the scene of a religious conflict in recent years that has claimed hundreds of lives. There had been warnings of attacks in the region over Easter. Many of the dead are thought to be motorcycle taxi drivers and beggars.
Witnesses say debris was thrown dozens of metres from the centre of the blast. Kaduna can be found on the dividing line between Nigeria’s largely Christian south and Muslim north. ‘Horrific act’ No one has yet admitted carrying out the bombing, but the BBC’s correspondent in Nigeria, Mark Lobel, says the radical Islamist group Boko Haram recently said it would carry out attacks in the area over the Easter holiday.
Local Christian groups have speculated that the bombers were targeting a nearby church, but that heavy security meant they detonated their explosives in a nearby area instead. Britain’s Africa Minister Henry Bellingham called the attack a “horrific act”. Meanwhile, security forces are on the scene of the bomb blast in Jos. National emergency management agency spokesman Yushau Shuaib said: “Security personnel have moved to the scene as injured are being evacuated.”
source: www.bbc.co.uk
International mediator Djibril Bassole, Burkina Faso’s foreign minister, confirmed a letter of resignation had been submitted. The resignation paves the way for the coup leaders to step aside and the parliamentary speaker to take over. Mali has been grappling with a separatist uprising in the north.
It intensified after the coup by army officers on 22 March. Sanctions lifted Mr Bassole, who represents the West African regional bloc Ecowas, met Mr Toure in the Malian capital, Bamako. “We have just received the formal letter of resignation from President Amadou Toumani Toure,” he told reporters.
“We will now contact the competent authorities so that the vacancy of the presidency would be established and so that they take the appropriate measures.”
What happens next?
Under the agreement, the Malian parliamentary speaker, Dioncounda Traore, will take over as interim president and govern with a transitional administration until elections are held. Once he has been sworn in, Mr Traore has 40 days to organise this poll, the deal stipulates. Mr Traore, who has been in Burkina Faso since the coup was launched, said as he left for Bamako: “I am leaving for Mali with my heart full of hope.
“My country has known enormous difficulties, but I am leaving with the hope the people of Mali will come together to face this adversity head-on.” Ecowas has lifted sanctions it imposed after the coup and an amnesty has been agreed for the coup leaders. The coup, led by Capt Amadou Sanogo, took place amid accusations from the army that the government had not done enough to supress the insurrection in the north.
Since the coup, key towns in northern Mali have fallen to Tuareg separatist rebels and their Islamist allies. The Tuaregs have called for their newly-named territory of Azawad to be recognised as independent, although this has been rejected by the international community. There are two main groups behind the rebellion: the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) and Ansar Dine, an Islamist group.
The MNLA is made up partly of Tuaregs who had fought in Libya on the side of Col Muammar Gaddafi and returned to Mali after he was killed. The latter has started to impose Sharia law in some towns. Among the towns to have fallen to the Tuaregs is Timbuktu, the 1,000-year-old desert city which is now a Unesco World Heritage site. Unesco warned that the fighting could damage Timbuktu’s historic structures.
Human rights group Amnesty International has warned of a major humanitarian disaster in the wake of the rebellion. Meanwhile, Ecowas is preparing a force of up to 3,000 soldiers which could be deployed to stop the rebel advance. The Tuaregs, who inhabit the Sahara Desert in the north of Mali, as well as several neighbouring countries, have fought several rebellions over the years. They complain they have been ignored by the authorities in Bamako.
source: bbc.co.uk
Wearing their trademark white ribbons or carrying white flowers, a number of demonstrators walked around under the Kremlin walls. Some handed out leaflets as part of their campaign against alleged ballot-rigging at recent elections.
Police only intervened to stop three people trying to set up the tent. One of them, environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova, was detained and then released, reportedly with a court summons. Two persons detained with her were also expected to be freed after being charged with “petty hooliganism”, Russian police told Interfax news agency.
“The tent outside the Kremlin is a symbol of resistance to an illegitimate government,” Ms Chirikova said later in a message on Twitter. ‘Another planet’ Protesters were not allowed to demonstrate on Red Square during the elections in December and March. The square was sealed off last weekend when activists attempted to gather there for a silent protest, and arrests were made.
But on Sunday, the atmosphere on the square was relaxed, correspondents say. According to Reuters news agency, “hundreds” of demonstrators turned out. “I feel like I’ve come to another planet, I do not understand what is happening, this is the Kremlin,” activist Vitaly Zalomov told Reuters. “Where are the police?” Huge protest rallies were held in Moscow after the parliamentary election in December and before the presidential election last month, when Vladimir Putin was returned to office.
Currently serving as prime minister to President Dmitry Medvedev, he is due to be inaugurated as president on 7 May, after which he will formally return to the Kremlin.
source: bbc.co.uk
Official figures are masking a growing crisis in the labour market, with only half the vacancies advertised in UK jobcentres guaranteeing enough hours to allow jobseekers to qualify for the government’s new in-work
benefits regime, a Guardian investigation has found.
The analysis of 112,000 Jobcentre Plus vacancies shows that only 52% of the positions guarantee enough hours to meet the new government definition of “work” for a typical family. It means that some working families are likely to be far harder hit by the controversial changes to working tax credits than previously feared by being caught in a new working-hours trap, and raises concerns about the quality of jobs being created in the economy.
The news came as the Institute for Public Policy Research warned that an extra 100,000 people will be jobless by the end of the summer. Its analysis of Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts of risingunemployment shows that new jobs being created in the private sector fall far short of providing sufficient employment for an expanding labour market. The OBR does not expect unemployment – which stood at 2.67m in March – to fall significantly until at least September 2013.
New in-work benefits rules were introduced by the government last Friday requiring couples to work an extra eight hours a week to keep their benefits. But competition to find such work is much stiffer than official figures acknowledge, suggesting that thousands of low-income families will see their income plummet. Out of 112,179 vacancies advertised on 22 February – the full Jobcentre Plus database at the time the Guardian’s freedom of information request was granted – only 58,534, or 52%, could be verified as long-term vacancies offering enough hours to meet the new government definition of “work” for a typical family.
The data reveals that at least 24,000 job positions did not offer enough guaranteed hours for families to qualify for working tax credit, which tops up the income of a family earning £17,000 by around £3,700 a year. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said the findings showed the government needed to take more action to boost jobs to avoid “devastating” consequences of its welfare changes.
“These figures suggest that unemployed people looking for full-time, permanent work are going to have a real battle on their hands trying to find a job that will pay them enough to support their families,” he said. “The consequences for these families will be devastating. Ministers have got to stop pretending that 400,000 vacancies are anywhere near enough, and look seriously about how to get our stagnating economy growing so it creates the proper jobs paying decent wages which will solve our unemployment crisis.”
A further quarter of vacancies offered applicants no guaranteed income, were for short periods of time, or were classed as self-employed, meaning benefit claimants could face serious delays to receiving benefits, or they may simply not have worked long enough to qualify at all.
More than 2,000 jobs on offer were for “zero hour” or “as and when” contracts – jobs which offer no regular or guaranteed hours, but which regularly require people to be available at short notice any day of the week, and at virtually any time.
These jobs, which are often in the nursery or care home sectors, offer no guaranteed income and rule out other part-time work due to their irregular hours.
In the areas hardest hit by the economic downturn, official figures show there are up to 22 jobseekers for every vacancy. But with many apparent vacancies being difficult or even unsuitable for those looking to raise a family, the true picture is likely to be substantially worse.
Previously, anyone with a child needed to work at least 16 hours a week to be eligible for tax credits – and around 13,000 vacancies did not meet this criterion. But new rules which took effect last Friday upped this limit for couples to 24 hours, meaning that if only one partner was in work, more hours must be worked. This affected a further 10,000 vacancies.
An additional 8,800 jobs did not offer enough detail to establish whether they offered enough hours to meet the government rules, while 5,400 of the remainder were classed as “self-employed” and so were potentially also ineligible, especially as many offered no guaranteed income or little to no guaranteed contracted hours. Of the remaining roles, more than 15,000 were classed as short-term on the jobcentre system, meaning they offered employment for at most six months, and often substantially less. One Citizens’ Advice Bureau adviser, who asked not to be identified, said welfare changes were “doubly punishing” families unable to get enough work to earn a survivable income:
“[Clients] say ‘well, if I could get an extra 10 hours a week of work I wouldn’t need the tax credits because there’d be more money coming in’. So there’s a bit of unfairness of the situation: they’re feeling doubly punished. One, they can’t get enough work and two, they’re losing the income they’ve got.”
“And if you’re working on minimum wage, 16 hours a week and you’re getting tax credits, you haven’t got any spare income. So it means cutting back on food, or cutting back on paying debt, or cutting back on putting money in the meter for your gas and electricity.”
Student Katy Carter’s partner works 20 hours a week and is unable to get an additional four hours’ work. Despite looking for work since Christmas, Carter says she has been unable to find a job which fits around her childcare commitments for her five-year-old daughter. “We lose just over £71 a week which for us is a substantial amount of money. We were just breaking even on bills and expenses such as food and transport and after looking through my budget, we now have a deficit every week. I understand the government has to save money somewhere but it seems ridiculous to take it from the people who need it the most.”
The Treasury said changes to tax credits were necessary to reduce the deficit, and said more people gained than lost from the changes.
Economic secretary to the Treasury, Chloe Smith, said: “The government’s actions mean that from the beginning of the new tax year on Friday, 24 million households will be £6.50 a week better off.
“We’re taking millions out of tax altogether by raising the personal allowance, which will put up to £126 cash back in people’s pockets. The basic state pension is also going up by its largest ever cash sum and there are increases in most other benefits.”
source: guardian.co.uk
As does the cringeworthy screech of “Here come the girls!” on the back cover, nestling alongside admiring quotes from Sugar and Martha Lane Fox. All of which strikes one as a rather outdated “suited, booted and shoulder-padded” portrayal of modern businesswomen which elsewhere in the tome Brady, an avowed feminist, argues against.
The chapter headings – “My Mission”; “Learning to Lead”; “My Rules for Success” – leave us in no doubt that this is a memoir told from the perspective of Brady the businesswoman. Born in Edmonton, north London, her father was a self-made millionaire, and Brady went to convent boarding school, followed by another boarding school where there were six girls to 600 boys – which, with my cod psychology hat on, seems apt preparation for Brady’s male-dominated working life. Indeed, other women barely get a look-in, though this could just be a reflection of the business circles Brady moves in.
Certainly she gives short shrift to the question that’s clearly been the bane of her working existence: how could she stand up for women’s rights (which she does at length in this book) but work so closely with people with interests in the porn business (Sullivan, Gold and Richard Desmond)? It isn’t the stupidest question in the world, and Brady’s response isn’t the strongest – just some mumbling about organisations such as Sky having adult channels too.
Nor does Brady fully address her arrest as part of an investigation into football corruption in 2008. (Brady was released without charge, so why the edit?) Similarly, a modicum of self-awareness could have stopped her going on so long about her ongoing and rather yawnsome battle to win the Olympic stadium for West Ham.
Brady’s prose verges on monotonous “business android” rather too frequently, but she’s gripping and often funny on such matters as being “first lady of football” at Birmingham City, and dealing with the hardboiled sexism she encountered on a daily basis. When a player yelled: “I can see your tits from here”, she replied: “When I sell you to Crewe, you won’t be able to see from there.” (And she did!)
Elsewhere, it’s admirable of Brady to admit that she was wrong to take only three days off after the birth of her first child because she felt fearful about her career. These days she feels that “having it all” is a ridiculous “pressurising concept” that does women no favours. Go Karren! Let’s just hope that the female Apprentice contestants are listening.
Brady’s account of her brain aneurysm is frank without being self-pitying. It’s as if the corporate mask slips and Brady the human being tentatively appears. “I might have looked strong but I found my fear quite difficult to deal with,” she says. When being driven home very slowly after surgery people were tooting rudely at the car: “I wanted to shout out of the window: ‘I’ve just had brain surgery, you twats!'”
I enjoyed these glimpses into her personality much more than all the business stuff. Strong Woman seems to be Brady’s attempt at a female business bible, in the mould of bestsellers from Sugar and Richard Branson. Fair enough. However, there are enough hints here that there may be a much more complex Karren Brady still waiting to come out.
Noises Off, though, is much more than a straightforward rib-tickler, both savvier and savager than the other theatreland farces currently on offer, Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors and Graham Linehan’s rampantly successful update of The Ladykillers: a virtuoso tightrope act that generates comedy from our fear of the abyss.
As we follow a troupe of actors touring a geriatric sex comedy (winkingly called Nothing On) through flyblown regional theatres, observing from a variety of angles as the on-stage action is overwhelmed by real-life pratfalls, it becomes less a voyage of dramatic discovery than a penitential progress. It’s genuinely hard to work out if the play is a tribute to thespians keeping calm and carrying on (or off), or a forensic dissection of the limitations of theatre.
Lindsay Posner’s production is a feat of technical brilliance that hasn’t sagged in the least since I saw it three and a half months ago, but neither (despite two new cast members) has it much changed: finely tuned, superbly crafted, but a thing of mechanical precision rather than wild laughter. It’s at its most rewarding in the second act, a ballet of backstage chaos whose astonishing intricacy – a blur of errant props, mistimed cues and acts of silent revenge – would not have disgraced Merce Cunningham.
The cast remains uneven. Robert Glenister seems to have reached the end of the road as the vulpine, bullying director, and Jamie Glover, not a natural comedian, has yet to discover self-irony as a leading man frustrated in love. But Lucy Briggs-Owen (taking over from Amy Nuttall) offers doe-eyed pathos as the female lead whose attention span is as unreliable as her contact lenses, while Celia Imrie’s tragicomic charwoman has, if anything, become more absorbing to watch: a glorious confection of precarious ego and incipient dementia. When she cries out, “I leave the sardines?” she somehow gives the line a riddling philosophical resonance worthy of Beckett.
source: guardian.co.uk
Eifman has divided the dance world for decades. Born in Siberia in 1946, he trained as a dancer in Moldova, taught at the Leningrad ballet school and founded his own company in 1977. At the time he was the only high-profile Soviet choreographer working in the modernist vein. While classically based, his work borrowed from the expressionist theatricality of European choreographers such as Maurice Béjart, and pieces likeBivocality (1977), set to music by Pink Floyd, offered an alternative to the frozen-in-aspic Kirov Ballet repertoire and the neo-traditionalist creations of Yuri Grigorovitch at the Bolshoi. That said, Eifman’s Leningrad Ballet Ensemble was state-owned and financed, and the Brezhnev-era culture ministry would certainly have censored any work in which it detected the slightest hint of subversiveness.
These days, tours of the Eifman Ballet Theatre are rallying occasions for the Russian expatriate community, which was out in glittering force for Tuesday’s first night of the choreographer’s Anna Karenina. The piece is set to a melange of Tchaikovsky works, and for dance lovers a challenging note is struck in the first seconds with the opening chords of the composer’s Serenade in C Major, a score indissolubly wedded to Balanchine’s best-loved ballet, Serenade. This is not to say that the work is out of bounds, but the comparisons it sets up are not in Eifman’s favour.
Dispensing with subplots, the choreographer strips the novel back to the love triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin and her lover Vronsky. A brief tableau reveals Anna’s sailor-suited son playing with a toy train (hint, hint) and then we move straight into a showy duet between Anna (Nina Zmievets) and Karenin (Oleg Markov). Tolstoy’s Karenin is a decent if repressed upper-class functionary, determined to believe the best of his wife until forced to admit her infidelity. Eifman turns him into a suave tyrant who expresses his frustration at Anna’s remoteness through marital rape.
In the first of many duets, he swings her from side to side, holds her dramatically aloft and launches her into splashy split jetés, to which she responds with wild eyes, outreaching arms and violent stomach contractions. Technically it’s impressive, in a manic kind of way; Zmievets and Markov are evidently superbly trained dancers. But there’s no sense of the infinite gradations of feeling detailed in the novel; Eifman does not deal in shades of grey.
As the piece progresses we realise that while the choreographer is magnetically drawn to emotional extremes, he’s wholly unable to delineate differing emotional states. So passion, ecstasy and despair all share the same language of frenzied gesture and starbursting limbs. All is hyperbole, with the choreography not so much acted as belted out, as if it were being marked by judges for difficulty. This Anna-on-Ice quality reaches its apogee when Karenin has discovered the affair with Vronsky (Oleg Gabyshev), and in the middle of a violent argument suddenly suspends the scene to elevate her in a spectacular one-handed lift, at the height of which both pause for effect.
What would a newcomer to dance take away from Anna Karenina? Awe, probably, at the stamina and technical skill of the performers. Zmievets and Markov are an amazing double act and Gabyshev pulls every manner of balletic trick out of the bag. There’s also a statuesque corps de ballet which Eifman deploys to often impressive effect, particularly in Act 2’s masked ball.
What’s missing is any real integration of dance and music. Eifman’s interest in his patchwork Tchaikovsky score extends only to using it as a backdrop. So the characters have no leitmotif or identifying musical themes, and there’s no sense of the concurrent development of music and story. Nor, more importantly, is there any leeway for expressive musical phrasing; the performers are far too busy writhing around their partners or shaping vertiginous lifts. Choreography, like any creative form, demands balance. What Eifman offers is yang without yin, force without yielding, the masculine principle unmitigated by the feminine. One can imagine it going down well in Russia in the same way that topless photos of Vladimir Putin go down well. But it didn’t quite work for me.
source: guardian.co.uk
It usually starts with a pretence of steeliness. Not the whole thing, I’ll tell myself, reaching for the ruined paperback. One chapter, a favourite passage, then I’ll wedge it back in with those books begun but not yet finished; the dozens more bought or inherited that I honestly mean to open, sooner to get to all of Dickens. I’m a chronic rereader, mostly of novels, and it is a habit as coiled with guilt as it is with pleasure, because every go-round with a favourite is also another time I haven’t read Bleak House.
The trouble is that a chapter or passage is never enough. The same qualities that seduced once seduce again. I’ve had watertight plans to parachute in at one of Brideshead Revisited‘s irresistible mealtime scenes, read, and get out again; plans ruined by the compulsion to flick back a page, back a chapter – gah – back to the prologue. The Go-Between is my private demon. An innocent reminder, I’ll think, how LP Hartley phrased his famous opening line… suddenly it’s midnight and I’m 100 pages deep and Ted is oiling his shotgun.
The affliction struck early. For me, as for many kids of the 80s, novels were pitiful things if not written by Roald Dahl, and aged 10 or so I met the unusual dilemma of exhausting an author’s catalogue. With Matilda,The Witches and the rest devoured, only Dahl’s intimidating stream of adult stories and the latterly published Esio Trot were left. I thumbed through Trot, dismayed that it didn’t have any obvious chocolate factories or marvellous medicines, instead a couple of moony pensioners and a tortoise. I supposed I could try it. Or (the option seemed amazing, possibly illegal) why not restart one of my favourites?
I haven’t gone back to Esio Trot yet, and every reread since that first shaky reach for Matilda has been tinged with the same concern: that to refuse the new is to break some elemental code of literature. That to reread is lazy, maybe even impolite. So I’ve faked anticipation when somebody spots the paperback I’m carrying and says that I’ll love Cecil when he appears in A Room With a View or that Any Human Heart gets very, very sad. I’ve thought about folding the dust-jacket of a pristine Mrs Gaskell around a battered Martin Amis, just to avoid a friend or relative asking: “Again?”
Examples mentioned here are personal. The novels that yoke the rereader are not universal – they’re not always good. Some of the motivations and satisfactions, though, must be shared.
It is time travel, a reliable way to reawaken feelings sparked by a book at first encounter. George MacDonald Fraser’s series of Flashman novels summons for me an early stretch at university, when I picked up one in a stranger’s room, skimmed a paragraph, and realised with excitement and dread that my set-text reading plan would now implode. Nineteen Eighty-Four brings back a thrilling first sense of professional life and the daily commute, Orwell’s novel finished while travelling across town for work experience at 15. Salinger’s slim book of stories will forever be a ski-trip coach that smelled not unpleasantly of Chewits; Laughter in the Dark a summer spent dumped and misanthropic and grateful for Nabokov’s mean wit. Howard’s End is the time I met my wife, opened every year since.
Security is a factor. Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson was funny when last picked up and can fairly be expected to have stayed that way on the shelf. No need to gamble on new characters or a new set of circumstances – abstentions that for some would void the chief appeal offiction are for the rereader a lure, because that massive investment of hours can be made without risk of disappointment. The last page of Steinbeck’s brick-sized East of Eden will unfailingly thrill me. I sweat through Tom Ripley’s police interviews every time.
Actually, those nervy near-arrests in The Talented Mr Ripley are a bit of an exception. Suspense is the first thing to die on a reread, and the experience is better for it. Familiar with the story, the plot on rails, the rereader can relax, look around and whistle at the scenery. I first read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead racked by an irrational fear that the old and ill narrator was going to croak on every next page. Only during a second and third read could I properly absorb Robinson’s gentle wisdom.
Even when it gets silly (a fourth reread, a fifth, pages tugged loose and the book plump with place-holding Travelcards), old favourites can surprise. On a sixth or seventh lap of The Go-Between, I finally paid proper heed to Marcus Maudsley, that fantastic little shit of an 11-year-old who has all the polished procedural snobbery of a Victorian ancient. A bit-player once ignored, now treasured.
I wonder if Hartley intended Marcus to be a slow burner. Some novelists definitely anticipate the rereader and lay rewards. Nabokov slaps an outrageous spoiler on page two of Lolita, detectable only if you’ve finished it before. At the beginning of the first Harry Potter book (guilty), there’s throwaway mention of a character who won’t appear for two more sequels. The novelists might be rereaders themselves, this their show of fellowship. Or perhaps it’s authorial swagger – confident assertion that, yeah, this is one of those books. The sort the rereader thwaps shut with a grunt, already reaching for Scotch Tape to strengthen the spine, smugly pondering the £7.99 investment that’ll pay back again in two years, in four…
To freshen my memory before writing this, I carefully explored my book shelves, alert for scuffed bindings, squeezing paperbacks for the tell-tale crackle of sand and crisp-crumb. They weren’t all there, my stalwarts, but I found them – some in a pile by the sofa, a few kicked under the bed, one hidden away in an old shoulder-bag. I’d seized them up when last ill or bored or moody or restless, in need of comfort.
Rereading is therapy, despite the accompanying dash of guilt, and I find it strange that not everybody does it. Why wouldn’t you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I return to beer, or blankets or best friends.
source: guardian.co.uk
Looking back over 2012, it was clear where it had all started to go wrong for the eurozone. Markets had rallied strongly in the first two months of the year following the decision by the European Central Bank in late 2011 to provide cheap three-year loans to commercial banks starved of credit. Interest rates on the bonds of the weaker members of monetary union tumbled, raising hope that Europe was emerging from its debt nightmare.
Then, on 2 March, Spain‘s new prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, announced that he was ditching the budget deficit target: instead of reducing borrowing to 4.4% of GDP as Brussels wanted, Rajoy would be aiming for 5.8%. He was later forced to bring that down, but only slightly.
There was no immediate explosion; it took a couple of weeks for financial markets to react to the news. But by early April, interest rates on 10-year Spanish bonds were back to where they were in the dark days of 2011. Back then, pressure mounted as the bad economic news continued during the spring and summer and by the late autumn Spain became the fourth eurozone country to need a bailout from the EU, the ECB and the International Monetary Fund.
That, briefly, was how many in the markets saw 2012 panning out as they headed off for Easter. The thinking went as follows: Spain has suffered a colossal property bust that has left it with weak growth, high unemployment and the shakiest of banking sectors. A double-dip recession will make it impossible to bring down the deficit in line with the Brussels timetable, particularly since the appetite for stringency is stronger in Madrid than at municipal level.
This makes markets nervous. the Greek crisis shows that investors face 70% losses in the event of default, and markets remain to be convinced Greece was a one-off. They are, therefore, demanding higher returns on Spanish debt. This adds to Spain’s problems, raising its debt-servicing costs, pushing up long-term interest rates,and making a bailout more likely. Little wonder the IMF says Spain faces “severe challenges”.
Spain will not need immediate financial help, and the good news is that it has already sold nearly half the bonds needed to cover borrowing this year. The ECB’s long-term refinancing operations will also provide enough liquidity to prevent Spanish banks from going belly-up.
But it is not hard to sketch out how things go from bad to worse over the coming months. First, signs that François Hollande will defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in a run-off for the French presidency give the markets jitters. Then, the lack of growth in Spain makes it look unlikely that even the watered-down deficit targets will be hit. There are demonstrations and strikes over austerity. Eventually, the government throws in the towel and admits it needs outside help.
Even this need not be a drama, if three preconditions are met. The first is that policymakers both in Spain and at the eurozone level learn lessons from the botched rescues of the past two and a half years. Experience shows that there is a need to move decisively and with speed. The second condition is that there are enough bailout funds available to the EU and the IMF to cope with the demands of Europe’s fourth-biggest economy.
Finally, there has to be a recognition, belatedly, that Spain’s deficit-reduction programme needs growth more than austerity. The war chest available to Europe and the IMF is probably big enough to cope with Spain. But the adamantine belief in cutting at all costs shows that lessons still need to be learned.
Nicholas Ferguson’s elevation at BSkyB hasn’t been applauded by all shareholders. He is not, they fear, the tough independent chairman prepared to overhaul the boardroom that the satellite broadcaster needs.
BSkyB’s is not a normal board. Of the 12 non-execs, four are News Corp placemen and three have been there more than nine years, which means they are not classed as independent under the corporate governance code. Two more, including Ferguson, will pass the nine-year mark next summer.
Ferguson, investors point out, was on transmit, rather than receive, when so many of them expressed concern about James Murdoch’s tenure after the hacking scandal exploded. Ferguson’s job, as senior non-exec, was to listen to shareholders. But while 45% of them were preparing to oppose or abstain from supporting Murdoch’s re-election, Ferguson was penning a letter robustly defending his chairman.
Sky investors would like someone with a record of delivering financial success; in Ferguson’s seven years at private equity group SVG, its shares have halved. But mostly they want someone prepared to force through change. And they are not convinced that man is Nicholas Ferguson.
source: guardian.co.uk