‘Are we beasts?’ asked Winston Churchill one night in 1943 after watching a film of the bomb damage done to Germany. The question was probably rhetorical: Churchill had authorised the bombing campaign from its puny beginnings in 1940 to the massive Combined Offensive launched with the American air forces in the last two years of […]
The man from the Jewish Chronicle confessed he normally did obituaries. Speaking professionally, this is a bad move in the middle of an author interview. The interviewee is likely to feel either that the interviewer knows something about his health that he doesn’t or that the JC does not take him seriously enough to send […]
A state of emergency was declared in Bangladesh on 11 January 2007. At least forty people have been killed in protests that began last year in October, when the Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, ended her five-year term and handed over power to an interim government. The media are being heavily censored and journalists are in […]
At the beginning of Phil LaMarche’s American Youth, a teenager accidentally kills his brother with a friend’s rifle. The question of blame seems straightforward; however, the friend, Ted, had loaded the rifle and left the brothers to mess around, despite knowing that they weren’t used to guns. Ted’s mother is sufficiently concerned to insist that […]
Dan Rhodes was included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list in 2003. His funny, misanthropic first novel, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, was ample justification for it. He also famously wrote Anthropology, a collection of 101 stories each 101 words long, which was a stylistic achievement if not of durable appeal; but he hasn’t […]
What is it about war that appeals to writers and readers of fiction? Genuine storytelling drama, of course, has to depend on more than bombs, bullets and bloody adventure. Like most genres of novel-writing, war fiction advances or retreats on the strength of its characters as much as on the context. A L Kennedy exemplifies […]
Seizure begins with hints of instability and violence. A woman stands in front of a mirror, daubing her mouth with an old, caked lipstick. In the room behind her, there is a bloodstained knife and a man who may well be dead. It could be a dream, or a vision of the future. Like a […]
Toby ‘English’ Litt opens the eighth of his projected twenty-six novels with a brilliant piece of defamiliarisation. He brings us in to land on the halogen-lit helipad of Hospital in a Dauphin XTP 3000 piloted by Hank ‘Cowboy’ Smith; Bill ‘Zapper’ Billson unloads an unidentified Caucasian male – plus a worried small boy – into […]
The most extraordinary aspect of this extraordinary novel is the vividness with which its author evokes a small, secret pocket, long since demolished, of the City of London as it used to be during the hot summer of 1967. Skin Lane, which provides the book with its vaguely sinister title, is a fictional street that, […]
As a literary editor, I often find myself staring in despair at the latest pile of books silting the shelves of my newspaper’s cupboard and wondering: will there ever come a time when people get fed up with writing books about the bloody Nazis? Not a week of the year seems to pass without one: […]
John Updike declared in a recent interview that while he was working on his last novel, Terrorist, his greatest fear was that someone might use the title before him. Surely there were dozens of authors, he argued, who’d want to write a book with this title in the present climate. Well, there was at least […]
The Light of Day (2003), Graham Swift’s last outing, was a singularly unhappy book. The unhappiness derived from several sources: drab subject matter, drab treatment, but most of all the feeling of an author weighed down and made almost wretched by the very act of composition. Seven years in the writing, the novel seemed to […]
This novel comes freighted with high expectations. It has sold a million copies in its native Germany and has been hailed as the most successful German novel since Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. At first glance it is hard to see why. Measuring the World tells the story of two nineteenth-century scientists: Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian […]
The common fox may only have a walk-on part in Blake Morrison’s new novel, but it does walk on rather often. The urban, the rural, the fictional, the mythical and the terrifying – the fox in all its different guises is the sniffing, menacing leitmotif of this fictional exploration of the social impact of the […]
This month it will be twenty years since Primo Levi died. It’s hard to believe. But at least we will be getting a new and (at last) complete translation into English of his Collected Works, of which these stories are a sample. It is a small but welcome consolation. My main regret is that it […]
The last live wrestling match I saw was at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 2002. The highlight was a ‘Fatties Match’, in which three men with a combined weight of nearly 100 stone cavorted around the creaking ring. They were wearing leotards and tiny pairs of underpants, and performed numerous unlikely somersaults that did none […]
In 1990 a former prostitute named Fatou Sarre was tried in Alsace for the murder of her mother-in-law. Why, the prosecutor wanted to know, had Fatou, after bludgeoning Odile Gayean to death with a hammer, proceeded to gouge out her eyeballs? Fatou’s reply was simple but surprising: she had been afraid that the dead woman’s […]
One of the minor consequences of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and of being a double Booker winner is that your publishers will bring out a collection of your book reviews and other articles, even though such things are nowadays usually considered to be unmarketable. This is actually the second collection of Coetzee’s essays […]
The subject of this book is the place of friendship in public life. Some people would say friendship has no real place there at all, and Graham Stewart seems to acknowledge this cynical view by choosing as his epigraph Harry Truman’s maxim, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ But there is, […]
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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