Now the word has been reborn as scientists increasingly find ways of bringing the new wave of technological services to us on

Now the word has been reborn, as scientists increasingly find ways of bringing the new wave of technological services to us on devices that we can carry around over our shoulder or in our pocket.
“Wireless” has morphed nimbly from retro to cool in the space of a few years. “Wireless telegraphy” was the name given to what would eventually be called “radio.”

The word lived on in many people’s minds. The word “wireless” entered our vocabulary more than a century ago, when Marconi and others developed a means of transmitting sound across the airwaves, rather than along wires. I had no idea you go to awards and have to wear posh frocks.” The shortlists BEST BOOK Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J K Rowling; The Insider, Piers Morgan; Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver; Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel & Sheila Ravenscroft; Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography, Sharon Osbourne; The World According to Clarkson; Jeremy Clarkson BEST AUTHOR John Banville; Alan Bennett; Kazuo Ishiguro; Carlos Ruiz Zafon BEST BIOGRAPHY Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel & Sheila Ravenscroft; Next to You, Gloria Hunniford; Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography, Sharon Osbourne; Stuart: A Life Backwards, Alexander Masters BEST CHILDREN’S BOOK And That’s When It Fell Off In My Hand, Louise Rennison; Ark Angel, Anthony Horowitz; Eldest, Christopher Paolini; I, Coriander, Sally Gardner; SilverFin, Charlie Higson; Wizardology, Dugald Steer BEST CRIME THRILLER Lifeless, Mark Billingham, The Lighthouse, PD James; The Take, Martina Cole; We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver BEST NEWCOMER Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde; Mark Gatiss, The Vesuvius Club; Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian; Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian BEST POPULAR FICTION Labyrinth, Kate Mosse; My Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult; The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger; The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella BEST SPORTS BOOK Being Freddie, Andrew Flintoff; My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes, Gary Imlach; Race Against Time, Ellen MacArthur; What If I Had Never Tried It, Valentino Rossi BEST HISTORY BOOK Auschwitz, Laurence Rees; Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk; Mao, Jung Chang & Jon Halliday; Persian Fire, Tom Holland BEST TV & FILM BOOK Coast, Christopher Somerville; The Constant Gardener, John Le Carre; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis; Rick Stein’s French Odyssey, Rick Stein BEST WRITER Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers; Diana Evans, 26a; Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl; Zadie Smith, On Beauty BEST READ The History of Love, Nicole Krauss; Labyrinth, Kate Mosse; The Farm, Richard Benson; The Conjuror’s Bird, Martin Davies; Arthur & George, Julian Barnes; The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Eva Rice; Moondust, Andrew Smith; March, Geraldine Brooks; Empress, Orchid Anchee Min; The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly. it takes literature into a different sphere, into a much more commercial sphere.” Marina Lewycka, one of four authors up for newcomer of the year, for her Orange-shortlisted novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, said: “I had the idea being a writer was the solitary thing where you write. Eventually in an ideal world you won’t have a need.” Having watched the British Book Awards last year, she said: “I couldn’t believe how glamorous it was…

Diana Evans, one of her rivals for the prize, said: “I think it helps get ethnic minority writers in the limelight. Zadie Smith heads the field for the Arts Council-backed decibel writer of the year for African, Caribbean and Asian writers. “It is a genre I don’t really think of myself as writing in,” Shriver said. “It’s interesting to be put in a different frame of reference.” Laurence Rees, the BBC television documentary maker, admitted he was ” almost more pleased with this than anything”, after his book on Auschwitz was shortlisted for the history prize against heavyweight rivals such as Orhan Pamuk, Tom Holland, and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Banville, who regards himself as cursed for always having been regarded as “a writer’s writer”, welcomed the chance of a broader audience. “In the words of Dylan Thomas, ‘It’s not for the great and the good that I write, it’s for the blonde and the blue-eyed’.” Lionel Shriver, who won the Orange Prize for We Need To Talk About Kevin, is in the running for the crime thriller award, against the veteran crime author PD James.

The eclecticism of the competition means that the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zaf?whose book The Shadow of the Wind has been a word-of-mouth bestseller, faces rivals such as the Man Booker winner John Banville for author of the year. The television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, who have their own prize chosen by their book club readers, say last year’s ceremony, which they hosted, was watched by 1.2 million people on television, four times more than saw the Booker. Members of the public can now join the academy in voting for the final winners to be announced on 29 March and broadcast on Channel 4 two days later. The awards are the publishing industry’s recognition of titles across every genre, shortlisted by an academy of publishers and former winners – who include David Beckham for his autobiography, although it is not known whether he has voted. But they face stiff competition at next month’s ceremony from JK Rowling, Jamie Oliver and Sharon Osbourne, as well as the autobiography of John Peel completed by his wife, Sheila Ravenscroft. So with the announcement yesterday that they will be rivals for the same prize at this year’s British Book Awards, organisers claimed to be planning an enforced exclusion zone between them.
The two are in the running for the book of the year for their respective works The Insider and The World According to Clarkson. The last time that the former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan and the motoring correspondent Jeremy Clarkson were at the same ceremony, the delicate subject of the reporting of the latter’s personal life provoked a punch-up.

And he conveys no sense of the cardinal’s torment, of his arrival at this point after a lifetime of suffering, as opposed to Myers’ smug superiority.To Sunday (020-7638 8891). Although this is the first time the cardinal has revealed his thoughts to anyone, Myers sounds as if he has made this speech many times before. Myers is a good choice if you want mellifluousness, whether of holy man or oily villain. But the inquisitor demands acting more complex and compelling than this.While one doesn’t expect an hour of fireworks – the cardinal has long been steeped in duplicity, and his prisoner doesn’t inspire fear or rage – it’s still disappointing to see a performance in which the cardinal merely raises his voice twice, his tone otherwise gently regretful, at times so soft that one must strain to hear.

“Man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil. Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.” Since men are foolish, Christ would have served them better if he had loved them less.
The narrator explains that the cardinal’s love of humanity has made him believe that he must “lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least, on the way, think themselves happy.”A text for our times, indeed, but not one that would seem to lend itself to transformation by Peter Brook – indeed, the only characteristic notes in this 50-minute monologue are the costume of the young man who is the silent object of the cardinal’s wrath (black silk Indian tunic and trousers), the harsh, white lighting (in Dostoevsky’s story, a single candle burns in the darkness), and the choice of Bruce Myers, Brook’s longtime associate, to play the cardinal. His flock, says the inquisitor, are happier if they are not free to think and act. Christ returns to Earth during the Inquisition but is arrested and flung into a cell, where he’s visited by the 90-year-old cardinal who presides over the autos-da-f?

The cardinal tells him that the Church has, for the past several centuries, been following not his precepts but those of the Devil.