Category Archives: Stories

Scotland Views: The Beltie Burn – A River Restored

The Easter Beltie Restoration project returned a straightened agricultural stream to a natural meandering course, to improve habitats for nature and boost climate resilience.

The project was the only one of its kind in the north east of Scotland, and has created a new, two-kilometre stretch of meandering river corridor flowing through ten hectares of floodplain, rich in habitats where nature can thrive.

The Beltie Burn is a burn in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which below Torphins and Glassel is known as the Burn of Canny. It begins in the hill of Benaquhallie, and flows for 25 km south-east through Torphins before joining the River Dee about 4 kilometres west of Banchory.

Previews: Country Life Magazine – Oct 5, 2022

The capital according to… Howard Jacobson tells Harry McKinley about the perfect bagel Trees for life. On the 50th anniversary of the Woodland Trust, Clive Aslet visits the Devon home of its farsighted founder, Ken Watkins. Speaking truth to power, British politicians have been at the mercy of cartoonists for centuries, finds Charles Harris.


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News: Germany-EU Energy Crisis Tensions, CNN Sued By Trump, Musk-Twitter

Tensions flare between Germany and the rest of the EU over the energy crisis. Plus: former US president Donald Trump sues CNN, a flick through the day’s papers and the London Film Festival kicks off.

Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Oct 7, 2022

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This week’s @TheTLS , featuring @GeorgeProchnik on Joseph Roth; @WilliamWootten on the Letters of Basil Bunting; Colin Thubron on human endurance; @lindseyhilsum on William Boyd; @GeorginaEMW on Shakespeare’s female editors – and more.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – October 2022

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HISTORY

ALEXANDER WATSON Under the Double-Headed DoveIron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 By Peter H Wilson LR

MATHEW LYONS A Country Fit for a Queen Tudor England: A History By Lucy Wooding

BIOGRAPHY & DIARIES

RICHARD VINEN:  Kim Kardashian of WestminsterHenry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1943–57 By Simon Heffer (ed)LRR

J B BOSWORTH:  Fascism in the Family Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe By Caroline Moorehead

FRANCES CAIRNCROSS:  Daily Mail ManThe Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe By Andrew RobertsLR

THOMAS W HODGKINSON Dine HardMadly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries By Alan Taylor (ed)LR

ART & ARCHITECTURE

ROBIN SIMON Smile & SubstanceThe Portraitist: Frans Hals and His WorldBy Steven Nadler

Stories: Putin’s Nuclear Threat, Burkina Faso Coup, Taiwan’s New English TV

Vladimir Putin’s threat to go nuclear in Ukraine. Plus: a coup in Burkina Faso is used by Russia to tighten its grip on Africa, Taiwan launches its first English-language television channel and the latest business news.

Previews: Art In America Magazine – October 2022

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DISABILITY CULTURE SO FAR

A 40-year timeline of disability art and moments that make up a movement.

THE EXCHANGE: SCIENCE FICTIONS
by American Artist with Lou Cornum

An artist and a sci-fi scholar share their esteem for novelist Octavia Butler, who extrapolated future worlds from troubled times.

HARD TRUTHS: MIC DROP
by Chen & Lampert

Artist-curators Howie Chen and Andrew Lampert offer advice on karaoke and other forms of art world hobnobbing.

There have been very few issues of art magazines devoted to disability. There ought to be more. As Art in America associate editor Emily Watlington, who took the lead on this issue, writes in her essay “Our Work Is Working,” disabled artists have been crucial to progress in disability justice and the art world in general, whether through storytelling, empathy-building, or outright activism. These artists place disability where it belongs: at the heart of creativity itself.

Arts Preview: Artforum Magazine – October 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans, Deer Hirsch (detail), 1995, medium and dimensions variable.

Artforum International – OCTOBER 2022

MAKE LIFE BEAUTIFUL

Alex Kitnick on the art of Wolfgang Tillmans

SEEDS OF CHANGE

Natalia Brizuela and Julia Bryan-Wilson on the art of Jumana Manna

INTO THE STORM

Alexandro Segade on the Ororocene

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 2, 2022

Celeste Ng’s Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality

“Our Missing Hearts” explores a fictional world where Chinese Americans are spurned and books are recycled into toilet paper.

What’s the Key to Understanding Donald J. Trump? Start With Queens.

“Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman’s biography of the former president, argues that it’s essential to grasp New York’s steamy, histrionic folkways.

A Nobelist’s New Novel, Rife With Pestilence and Writerly Tricks

Set on an imaginary island at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, “Nights of Plague,” by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, is a chronicle of an epidemic, a murder mystery and a winking literary game.