From its opening sentences Susanna Moore’s new novel alerts the reader to its possibilities: I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony. For a cop book, which at its basest level this is, that is pretty good. This […]
If life as a homosexual was half as depressing as Neil Bartlett’s second novel makes it sound, the term ‘gay’ must be a wholly ironic label. Cruelty, loneliness, persecution and suicide, it seems, are the gay man’s lot. A series of historical documents – a man’s fond note to his grandson written in 1886, an […]
The scotted-out Victorians are probably to blame for reducing the genre of historical fiction to its present lowly position in the literary pecking order. These days, anything set before Darwin and bathrooms seems to fall into two subcategories: daft romanticism or incredibly dirty realism. On the one hand, we have Ellis Peters and her host […]
Few parts of Britain have been as much described, poeticised, romanticised or celebrated as the Lake District. Melvyn Bragg, a Cumberland lad from the lakeland’s fringe follows in the footsteps of his fellow countrymen Gilpin and Wordsworth, and a whole host of priests, antiquarians, hacks and ramblers, to rediscover this miniature mountain range famous for […]
Dr William Ullathorne, the first Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, was once asked to recommend a book about humility. He thought about it for a minute, then said judiciously: ‘My own is the best.’ A couple of years ago, I published a general history of millenarianism, and if anyone had asked me to recommend a book […]
This intelligent, interesting and very readable novel is ultimately depressing, and thus is representative of much good writing today. David Lurie is a fifty-two-year-old, twice-divorced Professor of Communications in Cape Technical University in South Africa. His course used to be called Modern Languages, but this has been renamed in accordance with ‘rationalisation’. He has no enthusiasm […]
George Steiner once had interesting and unusual things to say, and he said them in a way that was all his own. Since then (perhaps for the greater part of the time that he has been a known name), he has been the very paradigm of one to whom Disraeli’s famous remark applies: he is […]
The closest we may ever come to learning how another human being thinks is reading novels. Despite the advances in science that could assist us to penetrate the mystery of another person’s consciousness, what will always remain is the old-fashioned method of making marks on some sort of surface. Whether the picture this presents is […]
By any standard, Primo Levi’s works must be ranked among the finest autobiographical writing of our age. Philip Roth’s claim that lf This Is a Man is ‘one of the century’s truly necessary books’ is more than just promotional hyperbole. It is the recognition that Levi’s exploration of the dark universe that was Auschwitz should […]
Mathematicians – the really, really good ones – are not like other people. One of the (true) stories recounted by Paul Hoffman concerns the mathematician who slept with his wife only on those days of the month that were prime numbers – the second, third, fifth, seventh, and so on. Not so bad early in […]
The growing success of Greenwich’s infamous Dome – at any rate among schoolchildren at half-term – has led to calls for those who criticised it in the first place to eat their words. My friend and colleague Richard Ingrams has a robust answer to this suggestion. Even if the project can succeed in paying for […]
F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are two of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Among the remarkable things about them are the peculiar similarities and parallels of their backgrounds and the kind of literary friendship – which was also a literary enmity – that they forged. Both were born to reasonably affluent […]
A few years ago, I was talking to Joyce Carol Oates, who teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University, about a poem she had written describing a deer in her garden. ‘Actually,’ she told me, ‘there were five deer; but art must simplify.’ I recalled this wry remark when reading Blonde, her twenty-fourth novel, which is […]
Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life. Two notebooks are missing, from late 1959 to three days before Plath’s suicide in February 1963. According to Ted […]
There are two puzzles that for many years have provoked speculation. Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all people are the British so good at both? The first is wound up in the fact that people are perennially intrigued by the seemingly unpleasant art of deception. It has been so since Gideon carried out his night raid against
That the Church of England is theologically flexible will come as no surprise to observers of the institution described by the High Tory poet C H Sisson as ‘the one Sun seen … through the mists of this island’. But even by the standards of the C of E, the career of Marco de Dominis […]
Harold Macmillan felt physically sick before every Prime Minister’s Questions, even though Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the opposition, would only ask him one question every three weeks. Even Tony Blair, possibly the best PMQs performer of them all, described Parliament’s centrepiece confrontation as ‘the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my prime […]
This is the story of obsession with a building. It centres first on the man who built it, then on a man who was desperate to live in it, and finally on a man who saw living in it as the height of his career. Villa Petschek in Prague was the dream of the fabulously […]
The John Murray publishing house has several continuities running through its long history. Seven successive John Murrays at the helm between 1768 and 2002 is one. The premises at 50 Albemarle Street, occupied by the company from 1812, is another. The Quarterly Review, founded in 1809 and running until 1967, is a third. Unsurprisingly, then, […]
I’ve written in these pages many times about writers and journalists in Myanmar who, over the years, have been imprisoned or persecuted by the military junta. These have included various appeals for the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi. Since the Nobel Peace Prize laureate took office in 2016 as state counsellor […]
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‘In matters of the heart, cats are at the heart of the matter.’
So says @OSoden on the explosion of cat mania in the early twentieth century.
Oliver Soden - Pussies Galore
Oliver Soden: Pussies Galore - Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
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A recent inquiry found that British security services had effectively licensed the IRA assassin known as Stakeknife to commit multiple murders.
@malodoherty picks apart the murky world of spying and counterespionage in Northern Ireland.
Malachi O’Doherty - Belfast Confidential
Malachi O’Doherty: Belfast Confidential - Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice ...
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‘Creative non-fiction, I am so sick of this bullshit’, says Michael Anderson, an editor of the New York Times Book Review.
@rosalyster returns to its genesis.
Rosa Lyster - Two Sides to the Story
Rosa Lyster: Two Sides to the Story - The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble Rousers, O...
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