I want a low-carb newspaper no more New York Times a low-carb

I want a low-carb newspaper (no more New York Times), a low-carb pet, low-carb air and, if possible, a low-carb lover.. I recall the first trip my husband and I made to Northern Ireland in 1995 We saw hope on people’s faces. We were even more encouraged and determined to do whatever we could to encourage those who took risks for peace. It is a signal event in the unfolding challenge we confront around this world today. Nihilistic forces are intent on destroying the modern way of life. But their plans to wreak havoc could be dealt a major setback if a new bid to restore devolution following all-party talks in Kent next month proves successful.The need for peace in Northern Ireland goes well beyond political stability It now speaks to regional Europe and even global stability.

The motive behind the push for peace now goes not only to the security in one’s neighbourhood, but also to Europe’s security and to global security as well.I would urge those that are part of the process to think seriously about the opportunity that is provided by the meetings in September There are tough issues to be worked out. Will the assembly and executive be set up? And the thorny continuing problems of decommissioning, policing, justice and human rights are serious ones that have to be worked through.But if too much time goes by, people lose hope. They lose faith in their leaders and lose faith in the democratic process, which is not only a loss for Northern Ireland but a loss for democracy.. We should be grateful, in a landscape crowded out with the likes of Big Brother and TV’s Naughtiest Blunders 14, that any literary classic gets dramatised for the small screen these days. Even so, I was slightly alarmed to discover the BBC’s intentions with regard to its latest remake of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s immortal Sherlock Holmes. The attempt to return Baker Street’s cadaverous, cocaine-injecting sleuth to the forefront of the public consciousness is to be called The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and the choice of Rupert Everett as the leading man is, according to the pundits, sure to upset the diehard fan.

On the one hand the film is not based on any known work by Sir Arthur but derived from “an entirely original plot”.On the other Rupert Everett, savage iconoclast that he is, has canvassed the need for a very different kind of Holmes. “I won’t wear a deerstalker or smoke a pipe,” he recently told an interviewer “The deerstalker is never mentioned in the books. It was invented by the actor Basil Rathbone, and now I’m taking it away and going for a mysterious and moody Holmes.”Doubtless there is a Sherlock Holmes Society somewhere in the English Home Counties – The Writer’s Handbook lists only an Arthur Conan Doyle Society care of a box number in British Columbia – and doubtless at some point between now and next year’s screening its members will be protesting about this re-invention.The row that breaks out between purists and TV adaptors whenever a literary classic is brought to television is one of the most regular sights of the modern media age At the same time, all resistance is futile. There is no point in complaining, as I used once to do, whenever Andrew Davies decides to crank up the bonk factor in Trollope, because neither he nor anyone at the BBC cares a bean. All you can do is grit your teeth and hope that two or three thousand viewers will be sufficiently inspired to wander into a public library and borrow the book.Leaving aside the particular villanies perpetrated on many a Victorian novel by inky-fingered modern screenwriters, it would be odd if succeeding ages didn’t reinvent great books and their characters according to their own preoccupations. There have, heaven knows, been plenty of predecessor Holmeses, all of them differing in some way from the remorseless, aquiline original.

Basil Rathbone played him as an English gent, Peter Cushing as an enigmatic brooder, Jeremy Brett as a wonderfully camp creation with a ballet dancer’s gait and baroque hand gestures. All this, too, is as nothing compared to some of the re-imaginings brought to certain cornerstones of the English canon.To examine the dramatic history of A Christmas Carol, for example, is to discover a tract for Dickens’ time capable of serial metamorphosis. Immediately after the author’s death it was interpreted as a spiritual allegory, with Scrooge’s moral about-turn seen as a form of Christian redemption Sentimental Edwardians saw it as a Peter Pan-ish fairy tale. A Depression-era British film offered scenes of prosperous burghers carousing at a Lord Mayor’s Banquet while the starving poor queued humbly outside – only slightly less detached from the template than a West Coast “adult” extravaganza from the 1980s called The Passions of Carol.There comes a point, in fact, at which any fictional item with sufficient elemental allure ceases to belong to its creator and transforms itself into a brand, ripe for exploitation by anyone who cares to put up the money provided a few rudimentary ground rules are obeyed.