Authors Electric

I recently watched the premier of Peter Jackson's ‘ They Shall Not Grow Old’ live streamed to our local Odeon. It is an amazing film that makes the record of the war suddenly contemporary. It is wonderful and devastating. I am not qualified to talk about the war, its dehumanising violence or its vivid intensity, but I was very interested in the preamble to the film. Someone whose name now eludes me, talks about Peter Jackson allowing us to borrow the eyes of the protagonists in that war. It is true we see every film’s story through its director’s eyes just as we see every novel’s story through the eyes of its writer. It is not an original or even a particularly profound thought, but it does go to the heart of what I love about the arts. To borrow the perceptions and thoughts of someone else, however briefly,  is the most amazing gift. It shows us both our differences from others and our essential commonality.   When I was a child in a small northern provincial town,...

Recent events have got me thinking about self censorship. I am hardly alone in that, nor are my thoughts particularly insightful, but bear with me if I share them anyway. As the product of my largely liberal education, I am in favour of free speech. There are inevitably a few politicians I would love to gag, a couple of radio pundits, and pretty much everyone on day time television who would greatly improve the quality of my life by never speaking in public again. ( This goes for a few people, I actually know too.)   I hate everything that suggests that a woman should only be concerned about her hairy underarms, wrinkles, cellulite, and ‘greys’, that suggests that without shiny straight hair and perfect toned physiques we are somehow failures, that we are less competent, more emotional, manipulative and hard to understand than the other half of the human race. If I were a person of colour, disabled, gay or transgender I would no doubt be as sensitive to any speech which denigr...