The following articles were first published in Time Out
In the Philippines, the word ‘Ilustrado’ refers to a class of native intellectuals who were nurtured by but then revolted against their Spanish colonial masters. It’s a fitting title, then, for Miguel Syjuco’s novel, which is both a dissection of his native land’s strengths and failings and an exploration of one man’s attempt to...
Read more →Having had great success with one animal fable, 2003’s Booker Prize-winning, seven million-selling Life of Pi, Yann Martel has gone one better: an animal fable in the shape of a play within a play. Beatrice and Virgil is the story of Henry, a novelist who believes that more “poetic license” should be taken with...
Read more →Why are we so obsessed with making lists? It is this question that Umberto Eco, the philosopher, medievalist and writer best-known for ‘The Name of the Rose’, sets out to answer in his latest piece of non-fiction. The result is a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, tour through two millennia of tables, lists and categories, supported...
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