Icon News & Events
How Barça almost missed out on the Silent Assassin
Posted on 2011/05/27 in General, tagged as
There’s a major piece in the Independent today on Luca Caioli’s biography of Lionel Messi, in advance of that player’s apperance at Wembley this Saturday for the Champions League final. ‘The remarkable story of how Barcelona captured – and almost immediately lost – the talents of the 13-year-old boy from Rosario, on Argentina’s Parana River, forms part of an engaging and superbly sourced new study of the player by the Italian journalist Luca Caio… Read more »
The Best Views from the Boundary reviewed in the Independent
Posted on 2011/05/27 in General, tagged as
Peter Baxter’s compliation of interviews from that great cricketing institution, Test Match Special, is reviewed in today’s Independent. ‘What radio programme could produce a book of interviews with subjects as diverse as the Duke of Edinburgh (“Is there anything about modern cricket you’d like to see changed?” “I only wish that sometimes some of their trousers fitted better”) and Denis Skinner (“Once you strip away the layers of mystery from the… Read more »
Delusions of Gender cited as one of the most influential books of the last ten years
Posted on 2011/05/26 in General, tagged as
Patrick Kingsley, writing in the Guardian, includes Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender among ‘ten years of brain food’ – the books which have most influenced thinking over the past decade, alongside Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, No Logo and The Black Swan. Read the full piece here – and scroll to the end. Psychologist Oliver James also cites the book in his piece about gender-neutral parenting in the same paper here.
Luca Caioli interviewed about Messi for the BBC
Posted on 2011/05/26 in General, tagged as
Luca Caioli, the author of Messi, the first and only biography of the footballer widely regarded as the best in the world, is interviewed for a piece on the player for the BBC website here. Messi will be in London this weekend for the Champions League final at Wembley against Manchester United. See more about Caioli’s book on him here.
The only driver Ayrton Senna ever feared
Posted on 2011/05/24 in General, tagged as
Legendary Formula One driver Ayrton Senna is the subject of a new film in hitting cinema screens at the start of June: But there was just one man Senna always said he feared – a very little-known driver from Dundalk in Northern Ireland, Tommy Byrne, whose life was as rocky as any high-octane Formula One race. His autobiography, co-written with Formula One journalist Mark Hughes, was published by Corinthian in 2008 and hugely praised. It went on t… Read more »
Labour leader Ed Miliband warns of a ‘jilted generation’
Posted on 2011/05/23 in General, tagged as
Taking a phrase invented by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik for their book, published by Icon last year, Labour leader Ed Miliband is today arguing that the UK risks creating a ‘jilted generation’ of younger people whose prospects of a stable, worry-free future are increasingly slim. As the BBC reports, Miliband will argue that the “Jam generation” of politicians – like Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne who grew up listening to the band The Jam i… Read more »
Slaughter on a Snowy Morn shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2011
Posted on 2011/05/23 in General, tagged as
Colin Evans’ gripping account of the case of Charles Stielow, a farm labourer wrongly accused of a double murder in New York state in 1916, has been shortlisted for a major crime writers award. As the CWA say: ‘The shortlist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction was announced on 20 May at a reception held at Crimefest, the International Crime Fiction Convention held in Bristol. This is a competition for any non-fiction… Read more »
Fordlandia shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography
Posted on 2011/05/20 in General, tagged as
Congratulations to Greg Grandin, whose brilliant tale of Henry Ford’s hubristic attempt to build an American town in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, has been shortlisted for the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, worth £10,000 to the winning author. The three other books shortlisted are: A Life in Pictures by Alasdair Gray EM Forster : a new life by Wendy Moffat Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurlin… Read more »
This autumn – a new Tintin film and a new biography of his creator, Hergé!
Posted on 2011/05/18 in General, tagged as
You’ll find it hard to ignore the new film from Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg this autumn – The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will be hitting cinema screens in late October. Here’s the trailer: Tintin was of course the creation of probably the most famous modern Belgian – the cartoonist known simply as Hergé. Icon are proud to present in October a brand new biography of this master of 20th century comic art from Raphael Tay… Read more »
Love, Sex, Death and Words in the Icon office…
Posted on 2011/05/16 in General, tagged as
Yes, it’s just another decadent Monday afternoon here at Icon HQ … or perhaps not – but copies of the paperback edition John Sutherland and Stephen Fender’s compendium of stories from literary history has arrived, which is almost as exciting… Love, Sex, Death and Words brings together 365 stories from the annals of literary history, which one story for every day of the year. The result is a fantastically rich and lavish tour through the histo… Read more »
