ShortcutsUK newsIt's been used to describe rioters, the media and the global financial sector. But what does 'feral' actually mean?Feral: there's a lot of it about, lately. The term has, of course, been a mainstay of Daily Mail headline writers for at least the past five years, prefaced in the early days by the fig-leaf "almost" but invariably followed by "youths" or, better still, "yobs". Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, caused a bit of a Twitterstorm today by pairing it with the term " Read More...
Book of the dayFictionReviewBanville’s characters are in flight from the crimes of the past in an eerie, playful synthesis of his previous novels
Here comes John Banville’s 20th novel under his own name, a wild masked ball rife with gossip about the books that have preceded it. We are in the world of 2009’s The Infinities, with which The Singularities shares an Irish country-house setting and a handful of characters. But here, too, is Freddie Montgomery, the violent protagonist of an earlier trilogy of novels – The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena – itself seeded by a real-life murder in 1982 that not only horrified Ireland but scandalised it when links to the country’s political class emerged. Read More...
Michael JacksonBlack and White: how Dangerous kicked off Michael Jackson's race paradoxAs the King of Pop’s skin got lighter his music became more politicised, and 1991’s overlooked album encapsulated this radical moment in music
For a figure as enigmatic as Michael Jackson, one of the more fascinating paradoxes about his career is this: as he became whiter, he became blacker. Or to put it another way: as his skin became whiter, his work became blacker. Read More...