ObituaryMichael ElkinsBBC correspondent renowned for the integrity of his reporting from IsraelTo a whole, earlier generation of BBC listeners, the journalist and broadcaster Michael Elkins, who has died aged 84, was the voice from Jerusalem. And what a voice. The timbre was gravelly, the accent one-hundred-percent American. More un-BBC you could not be. He was known worldwide. Arabists loathed him, less for the way he reported events than for the bad news - as they saw it - that he was always bringing. Read More...
Children and teenagersReviewPatrick Ness on a Costa-winning debutDifficult as it is to believe now, there was a time when Robert Mugabe was widely thought of as a "great, great man". A man who brought peace to newly liberated Zimbabwe after 15 years of war, who was awarded an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University (since revoked), and who has now, in the words of Jason Wallace's bleak, ferocious Costa award-winning debut Out of Shadows, " Read More...
BooksInterviewOutlander author Diana Gabaldon: ‘I needed Scotsmen because of the kilt factor’Alison FloodShe secretly wrote the first of her time-travelling novels while her husband slept. Now she’s published the ninth in the smash hit series. She talks explosive sex scenes – and where George RR Martin went wrong
Writing a novel shouldn’t have been high on Diana Gabaldon’s list of priorities in the late 1980s. She already had two jobs, as a university professor at Arizona State, with an expertise in scientific computation, and as a software reviewer for the computer press. Read More...
