62 h. ago Ukraine’s clandestine book club defies Russia’s push to rewrite history

Risking discovery and even prison, teenage readers meet in secret to discuss texts that Putin’s troops are trying to eraseIt must be one of the most dangerous book clubs in the world. Before they can feel safe enough to talk about poetry and prose, 17-year-old Mariika (not her real name) and her friends have to first ensure all the windows are shut and check there is no one lurking by the flat’s doors.Informants frequently report anyone studying Ukrainian in the occupied territories to the Russian secret police. Ukrainian textbooks have been deemed “extremist” – possession can carry a sentence of five years. Continue reading...

Culture

1 week ago The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – ‘It was like fresh air’

A fascinating, exciting history of how the agency smuggled subversive books across the iron curtainIn, I think, November 1978, I got a call from a rather grand British journalist who’d heard that I was about to go to Moscow. “A Russian friend of mine would dearly like the latest volume of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I don’t suppose you’d smuggle it in for him?” I did, of course, disguising it rather feebly by wrapping it in the dust jacket of the most boring book I owned: Lebanon, A Country in Transition. A customs official at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport flicked through it briefly, but even though the text was in Russian he didn’t spot what it was about. Two nights later, near the entrance to Gorky Park, I handed over the book to a shifty character who seemed to be a supplier of forbidden goods to the dissident community. He gave me a small 18th-century icon in exchange for it.It’s only now, all these years later, that I’ve realised I was almost certainly a rather n...

Society

1 week ago Reese Witherspoon’s March book club pick is a twisty romance for fans of The Notebook

‘Broken Country’ by Clare Leslie Hall follows two lost lovers

Politics

2 w. ago Silence please: how book clubs without the chat help focus the mind

A Silent Book Club is growing in popularity in Melbourne as an antidote to the social pressure of group discussionsGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIt’s commuter hour on a late-summer morning and the sun is still stretching through the leafy canopy of Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Gardens. In the cool, concrete sanctuary of MPavilion – the city’s annual architecture installation/event space/public shelter – a small group of people sit reading. Some recline on beanbags, some perch on stools; others lean against the fluted concrete wall, breeze running through their hair. For close to an hour, nobody speaks; they just read.This is Silent Book Club, where there is no required book list, no entry fee, no organised discussion. Just reading, quietly, in company. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Tucker Carlson says he’s ‘definitely more sympathetic to Putin than Zelensky’ because Russia is ‘thriving’

‘I am definitely more sympathetic to Putin than Zelensky for the following reason: I think it's fair to judge leaders on how they do for their country,’ Tucker Carlson said in an interview with Chris Cuomo

Politics

2 w. ago Irvine Running Club marks centenary with special book chronicling club's storied history

The book tells the story of the club from being founded in 1924 to the present day.

Culture

3 w. ago The CIA Book Club by Charlie English review – chapter and verse as a weapon of war

A gripping study of the CIA smuggling operation to get banned books behind the iron curtainIn March 1984 Polish customs officers noticed a suspicious truck. It had arrived on an overnight ferry from Copenhagen, docking at the Baltic port of Świnoujście. The truck’s interior was smaller than its exterior. Workmen broke through a walled-off inside panel. To their surprise, they found a cache of books – 800 of them – and illicit printing presses. And forbidden walkie-talkies. “Oh shit! Reactionary propaganda!” the officer exclaimed.The shipment was to be delivered to the Polish opposition movement Solidarity. The country’s communist leader, Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski, had banned Solidarity three years earlier. The forbidden books included critiques of the socialist system and pamphlets on human rights. Other works smuggled behind the iron curtain included Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, philosophical texts by Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, and copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly. Con...

Events

3 w. ago Judge OKs prison abuse settlement, rejecting Trump administration's push to rewrite protections

A judge has given final approval to a legal settlement that subjects the federal Bureau of Prisons to independent monitoring and increased transparency in the wake of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual abuse at a now-shuttered federal women’s prison in California

Events