William Golding

Tony Brown and William Golding

learn, live, thrive (Free subscription) | 17/11/2009

I came across by chance the biography of William Golding by John Carey, recently published by Faber and Faber. I rarely read literary biographies, let alone pay £25 for them, but this one was different. It was in part the biography of Tony Brown. I worked with Tony from 1974-1977 and he welcomed me to his house just before he died from cancer. I was a teacher in a Salisbury school, where he was...

Academy of Science, San FranciscoThis is the...

Yorkshire Soul (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009

Academy of Science, San FranciscoThis is the cafe, it's a really beautiful modern building.

books

silencing the bell (Free subscription) | 14/11/2009

So we had a mad dash around the charity shops today after M decided that she wasn't well read enough to get into Yale . Her reading list now includes: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Persuasion by Jane Austen Hard Times by Charles Dickens Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (labelled as a first edition but we have established it is not) The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike War and Peace by Leon Tolstoy...

Computers don’t do well marking essays for A-levels

TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009

That’s the story in the Times Online. A computer program used to mark A level English exams marked Ernest Hemingway as less than average and said he should write with more care. it rated Churchill as below average and didn’t like William Golding, either. This was a trial by the Chartered Institute of [...]

• A-level computerised exam markers give Churchill a fail - Times Online

Computerised essay marking a shambles They are...

EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009

Computerised essay marking a shambles They are some of the most memorable and stirring words of the 20th century, but Churchill’s speech exhorting the British to “fight on the beaches” would fail if submitted as a school essay and subjected to a proposed computerised marking system. The wartime leader had a style that was too repetitive, according to the computer being tested for...

• A-level computerised exam markers give Churchill a fail – Times Online - Monkeymagic
• Computer says D minus - Heresy Corner
• See the 7 articles on the same subject

Muir Woods National MonumentThe home of big...

Yorkshire Soul (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009

Muir Woods National MonumentThe home of big trees.Really big trees.

Down, Boy

Underbelly (Free subscription) | 13/11/2009

Frank Kermode considers "an element of violence" in the life of William Golding and tells us something Satanic: "...as drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden." London Review of Books ,...

Marking computer says no to lazy Dickens and dull Austen

News: News blog | guardian.co.uk (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009

The official A-level higher English exam marking computer takes young Dickens, Austen and John the Evangelist to task As you know, children, we have run all of your mock A-level English papers through the government's official examination marking computer. You will have read in the Times this morning of the fiasco when Ernest Hemingway, William Golding, Winston Churchill and Anthony Burgess failed...

New British Comics #2

Mindless Ones (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009

What no Terminus? Sadly no, not this week. Due to the considerable strain and effort of moving house I’ve been unable to do a Terminus this week. Just a one week hiatus, and it won’t happen again Sir. Instead I thought I’d shamelessly pimp my wares in the form of my contribution to New British Comics [...]

On Not Being a Gentleman

Bryan Appleyard (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009

At the end of his column in the Telegraph, Toby Young tells the story of a man named Bill who gained a poor degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, and was classified by the university's appointments committee as 'not quite' meaning 'not quite a gentleman'. The Bill in question was William Golding who went on to become Brasenose's only ever winner of the Nobel prize. Would the then commitee have

Sit down, old man

Bookninja (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009

Robert McCrum has some harsh words for the Depends and liver spot set: you may not know it, but you’re done. Good art, says he, like short term memory and genital engorgement, is difficult to sustain into one’s 70s and 80s. Ageing great writers recognise the inevitable no more than the over-optimistic late starter. Leo Tolstoy [...]

"Spaceship Earth" - A Status Update

The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel (Free subscription) | 10/11/2009

One of the leading experts on planet Earth, James Lovelock, believes that there is very little we can do to stave off global warming catastrophes. Lovelock is the man who created the Gaia theory – that the earth is essentially...

Friday Endpapers

About Literature: Contemporary (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009

William Golding's The Lord of the Flies illustrated edition Kelly Link's "The Wrong Grave" on Scribd.com Augusten Burroughs reads from You Better Not Cry More about Twitterature The Huffington Post's Scariest Books-Turned-Movies And the latest entrants into the E-book market Friday Endpapers originally appeared on About.com Contemporary Literature on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 12:24:20....

The curse of the New Statesman

donpaskini (Free subscription) | 30/10/2009

The New Statesman seems to have got even worse since its recent relaunch, with recent features like 'Barack W Bush' about how Barack Obama is like George Bush. The latest to fall victim to the Curse of the New Statesman is Dominic Sandbrook, a very well-regarded historian, who has produced a desperately bad article for them on populism and 'trial by fury'. Sandbrook's article advances the argument...

Simonides, 'Epitaph'; H. W. Garrod: 'Epitaph: Neuve Chapelle'

War Poetry (Free subscription) | 29/10/2009

Ō ksein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tēide keimetha tois keinōn rhēmasi peithomenoi. Simonides ' famous epitaph for the dead at Thermopylae has been translated countless times. (Scroll down here for 13 versions.) William Golding, self-taught in Greek, claimed that it could only be paraphrased, and offered this prosaic attempt: 'Stranger, tell the Spartans that we behaved as they...