Under the existing scheme, introduced three years ago, 18- to 24-year-old aspiring musicians are permitted to claim a weekly benefit of £51, plus a £15 bonus if they are members of bands.The council is also pressing for a more pragmatic approach to claims procedures so that it is no longer necessary for artists who suffer bouts of unemployment to sign off each time they are offered fleeting commissions."This isn't just about lovely fluffy arty stuff," said Arts Council spokesman David McNeill. "I want to be an artist, but when push comes to shove, the choices that are made are going to be the choices that bring in money."The Arts Council is to use the study as a springboard to urge ministers to extend benefit changes introduced through the New Deal to help struggling musicians to cover other artists. She liked cream cheese, bagels and lamb cutlets, served leftovers at dinner parties, and scoured the markets for cut-price bargains.In 1908, when she was 38, she married Edward Titus, an impoverished bookseller On their honeymoon he "carried on" with another woman. Like Kay in Masefield's Box of Delights, she "goes deep, goes small". But as Henry's forces advanced, he panicked, ran to take ship from Southampton, then settled for sanctuary in Beaulieu.His downfall was inevitable but oddly prolonged. She welcomed him to her court in Bruges and persuaded other European crowned heads to back him.Henry's spies nipped one planned invasion in the bud, executing the hundred or so brave souls who landed at Deal in 1495, but worse was to come. Lambert ended his days as first a kitchen boy, then a falconer.The young man whom Henry VII labelled as Perkin Warbeck, the errant son of a Flemish boatman, was a far greater threat when he stepped out of a ship on to the quayside in Cork in 1491 – slim, fair-headed and strikingly beautiful, all dressed in silks and satins.
His claim was easily disproved by parading the real young earl, who was enduring Henry's hospitality in the Tower of London. Given James's motives for commissioning a new Bible, his failure to proscribe the Geneva version as his own emerged is curiously not explained.Disappointingly, Nicolson never discusses the king's own extensive writings, especially his theological polemics, exegeses of scriptural books and translations of the Psalms, which cast invaluable light on the Bible project. For all their differences, men like Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and the puritan Laurence Chaderton managed to work together on a translation that bore some mark of them all, as well as traces of all the earlier English Bibles.Nicolson argues, at times brilliantly, that the desire for the reconciliation of differences was a broad characteristic of Jacobean culture: its negotiations between simplicity and lush display, between mystery and rationalism, between the sacred and erotic. For a start it appeared with myriad misprints and variations; nor did it, at least initially, eclipse the Geneva Bible, which remained the more popular edition. The King James Bible is heralded as the greatest literary legacy of the English past to the present. You conclude your oration with more false promises; promises to restore power to the people to whom it belongs through free elections." The dictator's ultimate delusion is in his supernatural powers: that should the people refuse to vote, the wild animals will come out of the bush to re-elect him.Kourouma draws vividly on the logic, imagery and speech rhythms of the Malinke people.
Koyaga's father was the first Paleo to wear clothes, to fight heroically for the French colonisers. The impact of his timely satire on colonial and post-colonial Africa is not dependent on knowing that its main protagonist is modelled on Eyadema of Togo, or on spotting allusions to former African rulers such as Mobutu, Bokassa or S?u Tour?his is the epic tale of Koyaga, despotic president of the fictional Republic of the Gulf. (A further novel, Allah n'est pas oblig?won the Prix Renaudot in 2000.) In fact, he is the leading writer of C?d'Ivoire, born in 1927 in the Muslim north of that country currently ravaged by civil war. For a literary novel to sell 100,000 copies is rare; that its author should be a septuagenarian, francophone African is something of a miracle.