Box Clever

Posted on by David Gelber

Here are two very different books about television. One is a great slab of a thing that calls itself a ‘biography’ of the medium, the other is a slim volume that claims to be merely a ‘bingewatcher’s notebook’, though as that binge watcher is Clive James, we can be sure it will be rather special. […]

Gui Minhai

Posted on by David Gelber

On 15 November, to mark the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, PEN is highlighting the case of publisher Gui Minhai, who disappeared from his holiday home in Thailand in October 2015. Gui is a Chinese-born Swedish citizen and a former board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, composed of leading dissident writers living in […]

In the Sanatorium

Posted on by David Gelber

Linda Grant’s latest novel has a rather grim premise. Eighteen-year-old twins Lenny and Miriam Lynskey, the children of Latvian-Jewish immigrants, are beginning to find their way in post-Second World War London. It is a place of ‘mostly grey and beige and black and mud-coloured people’, of rationing and devastation, but also one of opportunity. But […]

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Age Shall Not Weary Them

Posted on by David Gelber

Lively by name, lively by nature: if there is one quality that unites the fifteen stories in this new collection, it is the author’s curiosity about life. Most are told from a single, female point of view, with characters musing on relationships and the events that have shaped their lives so far. The protagonists tend […]

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Here I Stand

Posted on by David Gelber

The entirety of David Grossman’s new novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar, takes place in a comedy club in Netanya, a small Israeli town. The narrative spans the set of Dovaleh Greenstein, a stand-up celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday. He has acquired the accoutrements that are not uncommon to middle-aged comedians: a handful of failed […]

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Road to Nowhere

Posted on by David Gelber

If the measure of a satirist’s blade is how many accurate and quiet incisions it can make in its target – in this case, a society that has forgotten how to be self-critical – then Tony Tulathimutte’s scalpel of cultural dissection is very sharp indeed. The further one progresses in his debut novel, a tale […]

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When the Music Stops

Posted on by David Gelber

Zadie Smith’s fifth novel tells the story of two close friends, brown-skinned girls from northwest London who share an obsession with dance. The pair grow apart: Tracey just about makes it to the West End stage while the narrator-protagonist lands a job as a PA to a millionaire pop star named Aimee, who is a […]

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Closing Time

Posted on by David Gelber

Autumn is surely the first novel about Brexit, but don’t let that put you off. It’s also a wonderful celebration of friendship, art and everything that matters: loyalty, kindness, the beauty of nature and the lifelong solace of reading. It’s a book that could be claimed by any number of interested parties, from gerontophiles to […]

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On the Brink

Posted on by David Gelber

‘Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but he could equally have been describing the decay and diminution of old age. Margaret Drabble has borrowed the title and some of […]

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Whither Woodville?

Posted on by David Gelber

Historical fiction is founded on paradox: past generations were so different from and yet in some ways so similar to our own. In Robert Irwin’s extraordinary tale a larger paradox looms. Amply researched yet unceasingly insistent on its own fictionality, Irwin’s latest novel is like an intricate medieval tapestry or multicoloured stained-glass window, promising neither […]

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Clocking On

Posted on by David Gelber

‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,’ says Orson Welles, playing Harry Lime in The Third Man. ‘In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The […]

Invasive Procedures

Posted on by David Gelber

Horrifying. There is no other word for the madness and monstrous ambition of such surgeons as William Beecher Scoville, Luke Dittrich’s grandfather. For years during the mid-20th century they tampered with their patients’ brains – about which they knew next to nothing – to satisfy their curiosity. Scoville rarely understood what he was doing or […]

Border Patrol

Posted on by David Gelber

Rory Stewart, wanderer, writer, once a soldier, briefly deputy governor of an Iraqi province, now a Member of Parliament and a junior minister, has a roving, enquiring mind, which makes him on the page (the only place I know him) most agreeable company. Ostensibly this book is an account of a walk along Hadrian’s Wall […]

Revolting Mind

Posted on by David Gelber

‘Would we have liked to live with him?’ asked Thackeray, contemplating Swift, a question he immediately ducked by supplying a long list of other writers with whom we might prefer to spend our time. Samuel Johnson, similarly recoiling from the evidence of Swift’s character as manifested in his works, thought him ‘a man of rigorous temper’, whose ‘vigilance of minute attention’ must have made him unbearable. Even his best friends, on whose testimony Johnson relied, depicted him as cold, frugal, petulant and severe. None of this would have surprised the man himself. In his autobiographical ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’ (1731), he imagined widespread indifference to his demise and posthumous distortions

Line Management

Posted on by David Gelber

Opening lines are a good place to start. How did Lady Chatterley begin? Nobody remembers – I suppose in 1960 we were flicking ahead impatiently – but Richard Cohen reminds us that the opening lines were overblown and ‘a little pompous’. His own preferences include those of Lolita (‘light of my life, fire of my […]

Earthly Delights

Posted on by David Gelber

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a monopoly on landscape style from the 1760s until he dropped down dead

A Book of Two Halves

Posted on by David Gelber

Literary friendships can be odd, edgy, rivalrous things, even when the individuals concerned are distinct enough to give some comfortable distance. When he was university librarian at Hull, embracing

Progression through Regression

Posted on by David Gelber

The terms ‘Salafist’ and ‘Jihadist’ appear on television and in our Facebook and Twitter feeds almost daily. But they have become akin to Orwell’s description of the word ‘fascist’, terms rendered ‘almost entirely meaningless’, so overused that they now convey little except in so far as they signify ‘something not desirable’. This is where Shiraz […]

Living at the End of a Barrel

Posted on by David Gelber

When Barack Obama was asked what had been the principal frustration of his time in the Oval Office, his instant reply was that he had been utterly stymied on gun control. Amid the carnage (most shootings, aside from those with multiple victims, go unreported), 2,500 children and teenagers die in America every year in incidents […]

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Posted on by David Gelber

We are born without any, or with very little. We grow up resisting attempts to wash it, tame it or cut it, but by the time we are adults most of us have developed a certain attachment to our hair. It’s personal. Other people’s hair is another matter. We lovingly stroke the hair of dogs […]

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