On 28 March 1806 a ship flying the Russian navy’s St Andrew’s Cross limped into San Francisco harbour. Ignoring warning shots from a fort on the promontory, it dropped anchor, and a boat put ashore a tall, gaunt man wearing jewelled decorations over a baggy uniform spotted with mould. Washed and fed by the settlement’s […]
Most works of fiction are, on one level or another, about real people. Such are the depths to which the aesthetic imagination is occasionally reduced in its search for raw material that nearly every novelist ends up introducing some kind of roman à clef element into his or her books: many of the great English […]
My father was a slave of the Soviet State in the gold mines of Kolyma and my destiny, too, is repeating this pattern and the brutality of Kolyma. My father was tried in court as an Enemy of the People, so it turns out I am a ‘Son of the Enemy’. I break rocks with […]
David Kolski, aged 42, is a left-leaning idealist. Employed as construction manager to oversee the erection of France’s tallest skyscraper, he narrates his determination to succeed in tandem with the development of his extramarital relationship with Victoria, the imperious head of human resources at a multinational company. It becomes clear within the first few pages […]
Andrew Greig’s version of a Scottish Border song ‘The Ballad of Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea’ is a tense, atmospheric study of a political powder keg and the love triangle that threatens to ignite it. In one of the best historical novels of recent years, Greig dusts off the past and presents it with tremendous […]
‘I have the feeling’, confides Richard Cathar, the hero and narrator of Justin Cartwright’s eccentric new novel, Lion Heart, ‘that I have strayed into genre fiction.’ His suspicion is correct. This long, diffuse, improbable narrative dallies with a series of popular forms that might strike some as unexpected choices for the distinguished, Booker-shortlisted author. The book […]
The daughter of Indian immigrants from West Bengal, Jhumpa Lahiri spent her formative years in America, but she is keenly aware of her Bengali inheritance. Her short-story collections (Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Unaccustomed Earth, published in 2008) and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), have explored […]
Jonathan Coe’s artful, comedic novels have dealt with the recent British past: the 1980s in What a Carve Up!, the 1970s in The Rotters’ Club, and the turn of the millennium in its sequel, The Closed Circle. Expo 58 takes a step further back and afield: the British presence at the 1958 World Fair in […]
Counterfactual history in the novel is usually the domain of genre fiction. Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978) presents a Britain conquered and occupied by a victorious Nazi Germany and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992) opens in the week before Hitler’s 75th birthday. D J Taylor’s 11th novel, The Windsor Faction, charts a similar alternative history, albeit one […]
Men from the towns along the Volga sell crayfish in Moscow’s markets out of plastic barrels. While the crayfish wait to be bought, they crawl over each other, reaching up towards the light. Sometimes, one manages to hook a claw over the rim of a barrel and pull itself up. Before it can escape, however, […]
The first few pages of Ruth Ozeki’s Booker longlisted novel are electrifying. The reader – so used to being a wallflower – all of a sudden has nowhere to hide. From the off we are called into conversation by Nao, a smart-mouthed, hyperactive teenage girl who is writing to us in the pages of her […]
The manuscript for Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers, accumulated dozens of rejection letters and sat in a drawer for nearly three years. Eventually Bellevue Literary Press, a tiny, not-for-profit imprint affiliated with a New York mental health institution, paid him a reported $1,000 advance and released the book in 2009. It garnered some word-of-mouth interest […]
Thomas Pynchon is said to be disdainful of his 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49, in which spunky heroine Oedipa Maas uncovers a vast, clandestine communications system known as WASTE, rump of a renegade 16th-century postal service with occult interests and a rather beautiful name, the Trystero. Technical specifics aside, it’s impossible to overlook […]
The other day, in a mock Oxford interview, I asked a pupil of mine whether he agreed with the idea that the Roman Empire still, effectively, exists, or arguably has a greater extent than ever before, what with the Roman Catholic Church, the numerous legislatures calling themselves senates, the spread of Latinate languages throughout the […]
You might expect that an exhaustively researched book, sporting over fifty concluding pages of references and acknowledgements, would be on the heavy side, something to be slogged through; but this account of the changing expectations and practices of marriage and attachment, from the end of the First World War to the start of the Sixties […]
Four years ago, Edward Hollis produced The Secret Lives of Buildings, a wonderfully erudite romp through some of the world’s most famous, much-altered constructions, from the Parthenon to Notre Dame, via Hagia Sophia and the Alhambra, San Marco, the Wailing and Berlin Walls and even the disastrous Hulme crescents of Manchester’s postwar redevelopment. En route, […]
We didn’t have a TV in the early 1950s, not even for the coronation. To the middle middle classes, television was a bit naff, like lava lamps later, or giant screens today. But in 1956 we went to live in America for a year and everybody had a television, just as everyone had a car. […]
Most accounts of the relationship between Britain and Germany reiterate a depressingly familiar narrative of how things went wrong, dwelling on the rise of Anglo-German antagonism and the causes of the two world wars. In this original and ambitious book, Miranda Seymour turns it all around and looks at the people who wanted to keep […]
The Syrian city of Aleppo has been much in the news lately, but for all the wrong reasons. Aleppo is one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited settlements, a cradle of civilisation and of the Abrahamic religions. Perched on ancient trade routes, the city is – or was – a dazzling mosaic of caravanserais, souks, […]
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It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk