The Independent

Leon Fleisher: 'My life fell apart...'

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

At 16, he was 'the pianistic find of the century'. There followed a sparkling two decades before his right hand seized up mysteriously. Now, after a 40-year battle to regain mastery of the keyboard, Leon Fleisher is headlining next month's Aldeburgh Festival. Lynne Walker hears his extraordinary story

Playing Days, By Benjamin Markovits

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

This account of life with an anonymous German basketball team offers an astute anatomy of failure

Summertime 2100, and the living isn't easy

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

What will London be like a century from now? Seven degrees warmer, with water-absorbent streets and parched public parks. Marek Kohn paints an unnerving picture of metropolitan life in the sweaty grip of a radically changed climate

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, by Roland Chambers

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

The Arthur Ransome of popular imagination is as buoyant as one of his lake-lashed dinghies. He created, in the Swallows and Amazons series, a 1920s halcyon dream-world anchored to a permanently playful summer holiday. The Lakes of Ransome lore remain a landscape where nature is a cipher for innocence, toil and decency. It is, as biographer Roland Chambers states, an idyll of "cotton tents and grog and tea at four, and children who say 'jolly' and play by the rules; well-behaved children who rise early and know how to do things, tie knots and sail a boat." That legacy still fills the coffers of the thriving tourist industry of Windermere and Coniston Water.

Tony Parsons: Punch drunk love

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

On completing his trilogy about modern masculinity, the novelist and amateur pugilist Tony Parsons opens up about marriage, parenthood and failing to live up to his father

Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel

30 May 2010 12:00 AM

Don't be fooled by these talking animals – the author of 'Life of Pi' is up to some cruel literary tricks

The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, ed Sarah Eyre and Ra Page

14 December 2008 12:00 AM

No place like home

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan, ed Gordon Jarvie

09 November 2008 12:00 AM

So many of these tales are concerned with loss and death – the loss of children or a partner, or the threat of extinction from an alien hand – that it's no surprise to learn many were written either against the backdrop of war or famine, or about a specific battle or conflict. The hope of survival in another form is apparent too, with vanished lovers or children being transformed into birds or animals, giving many of the stories an added poignancy.

Forgotten authors No. 13: Dodie Smith

09 November 2008 12:00 AM

I'd like to think that Dodie Smith is not forgotten by new generations of readers, but her curse is to have been eclipsed by Disney, for Ms Smith wrote The Hundred And One Dalmations. It would be a shame if she was remembered only for the films, for there was far more to her career. A Lancastrian born in 1896, Smith entered RADA but failed as an actress, and went to work for Heal's furniture store. During this time she became a successful author, inspiring the headline "Shopgirl writes play".

The Smoking Diaries: The Last Cigarette, By Simon Gray

09 November 2008 12:00 AM

This valedictory from Simon Gray, who died in August, is a delight, full as it is of all that is best and worst about human nature: hatred, fear, joy, generosity, compassion, honesty. In it, he is facing up to the end of 60 years of smoking, so a certain irascibility is inevitable, but it's always amusing how the small things cause the greatest outbursts – for example his utter disgust at the woman next to him on a plane who can't stop sneezing and blowing her nose and stuffing paper cups with used hankies.