Jennifer Tennant

  • The world is bigger than the literary canon

    The lists of “100 Authors to Read Before Graduation” and the “50 Classics All School Learners Should Read” I came across recently compel me to reply to those who compile them. There is something faintly absurd about a list called “The 100 Greatest Authors of All Time” that contains 20 or 30 writers from Britain…

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  • The Three Laws were never enough

    Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were written as science fiction in the 1940s. Today, they look increasingly like an early attempt to grapple with a problem we are only beginning to understand. The first law was simple enough: a robot may not injure a human being, or allow a human being to come to…

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  • The story was always Dolly

    The story was always Dolly

    There are people whose deaths make us realise how much of our lives they had quietly occupied. Dolly Parton was one of those people. The tributes will rightly celebrate the extraordinary voice, the songs, the films, the rhinestones, the towering blonde hair, the humour, the business empire and the philanthropy. But I don’t think that…

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  • This week, I found myself sitting for hours in a packed public hospital waiting room. The queue barely moved. Plastic chairs scraped on the floor, babies cried somewhere in the distance, and every few minutes someone would sigh loudly and ask, “Who’s the last one in the line?” It was the kind of scene that…

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  • If suspense is your thing, then Linwood Barclay’s Elevator Pitch might be just what you’re looking for. It starts with an actual elevator pitch by a scriptwriter, which ends way worse than the expected “no” from the executive he’s been stalking. By the end of Monday, five people are dead – four in what seems…

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