1 The right not to read.
4 The right to read it again.
2 The right to skip.
5 The right to read anything.
3 The right not to finish a book.
7 The right to read anywhere.
8 The right to dip in.
6 The right to mistake a book for real life.
9 The right to read out loud.
10 The right to be quiet.
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| Illustration by Quentin Blake |
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| Illustration by Olivia Locher |
Pirette McKamey on helping students believe that what they write really matters
Editor’s Note: In 1988, a teacher most commonly had 15 years of experience. In recent years, that number is closer to just three years leading a classroom. The “On Teaching” series focuses on the wisdom of veteran teachers.
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| Foreign language … Amy Adams in Arrival (2016), the film version of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life. |
We don’t need crash-bang confrontations in moral black and white. These novels tell more subtle stories, where the line between human and other blurs
Nina Allan
Wednesday 17 May 2023
Say the words “alien invasion” and the stories most people think of are those told in movies like Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), in which the battle lines between good and evil are cleanly divided. HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds. Half a century later, John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) envisaged the melting of the ice caps not as the by-product of human negligence but as the result of a hostile intervention by alien forces.
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| ‘I pushed it as far as it would go’ … the 81-year-old writer. Photograph: Sarah Lee |
He is a sci-fi titan but M John Harrison has just exploded into the mainstream – with The End of Everything, an apocalyptic novel set on the Kent coast. Does he really think we have no hope left?
Lisa Allardice
11 November 2026
After years on the margins, Harrison’s win for this resonantly disturbing dystopia brings the visionary writer the recognition he deserves
Justine Jordan
The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award
Emma Loffhagen
Monda 9 November 2026
Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history.
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| Actor Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. |
At 89, the star of the Graduate and Rain Man demonstrates both brilliance and a startling lack of self-awareness
The choice of title for an actor’s autobiography can be revealing. Sylvester Stallone went with The Steps, conflating life’s challenging progress with those steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Rocky euphorically ran up. Michael Douglas cheerfully and unreflectively called his One Helluva Ride.
Guido Guidi reads and threads together the signs of the world. He collects and observes rather than claiming to “create.” He seldom speaks in the first person and, by conviction, steers clear of the personalism of “I”. He favors silence over speech, suggestion over symbol, the epigram over the manifesto, the quotation over the declaration. He delights in ambiguity, misreading, wordplay, and transgression, and, in his reserve, most often speaks through the words of others, “in quotation marks”. For all this—and indeed because of it—he is regarded as a master by several generations of artists.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LE BAL Archive
In the meticulously staged photographs of Gregory Crewdson, everyday life is transformed into a quiet, cinematic enigma. Over the past three decades, the American photographer has developed a distinctive visual language that blurs the boundary between film and photography. His images are carefully constructed like movie scenes—complete with actors, elaborate sets, lighting crews, and detailed storyboards—yet they ultimately result in a single, silent frame. For Crewdson, photography is defined by its stillness: there is no narrative before or after the captured moment, only the unresolved mystery held within the image.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive
Few photographers have probed the human condition with the curiosity and unsettling clarity of Diane Arbus. Throughout the 1960s, Arbus turned her camera toward people who existed both at the center and at the margins of society—individuals whose lives rarely appeared in the carefully polished imagery of postwar America.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fraenkel Gallery Archive
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary artists. Her work explores how images create history, form memory, and determine who is seen and who remains invisible. Using her own biography as a starting point, she develops an oeuvre that goes far beyond the personal and investigates issues of identity, belon- ging, and representation. To this end, she employs documentary, staged, and con- ceptual strategies, developing a visual language that is equally poetic and political.
By Dimitris Lempesis
In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images (Part I).
By Dimitris Lempesis
In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images.
By Dimitris Lempesis
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| Roberto Gómez Bolaños |
