Some kind soul must have sent Kingsley a crate of milk of magnesia. Free of the rancid , dyspeptic tone that has corroded most of his recent work, Difficulties With Girls perks with so much curiosity and energy it might have been written in the year in which it’s set, 1968. The characters coping with […]
Frances Borzello is firmly on the side of women, art, and, luckily for us, readers. As editor with A L Rees of The New Art History, she has a firm hold on available art scholarship but adds to this a joyous, assured conversational style. Thus she starts: I want to state that the situation of […]
The nineteenth-century painter Benjamin Robert Haydon was convinced that his best works rivalled the masterpieces of the Renaissance – a judgement facilitated by his near-blindness. Standing in front of one of them, his noble, ugly face masked by several pairs of spectacles, he exclaimed: ‘What fire, what magic! I bow and am grateful.’ Wordsworth, who […]
J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill. For the past thirty years Ballard has remained the most original voice in English fiction, always eschewing the easy stage-props of his contemporaries, and […]
This book is the abridged English translation of two volumes that originally appeared in Norwegian, the first in 2006 – the centenary of Ibsen’s death – and the second in 2007. It is the fourth major biography of Ibsen to appear in English since 1931. All four are quite hefty volumes, de Figueiredo’s not least, […]
With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size and actuarial precision of the surviving Chaucer archive speaks volumes about the dedication of medieval society to tallying, record keeping and categorising: we know […]
The Bible is the central book of Western culture. It has deeply influenced our literature, music and art, as well as our history and institutions. Every year Oxford University Press sells a quarter of a million copies of the Authorised Version alone. Yet most people in the UK now probably find it a strange and […]
Which women have made the biggest breakthroughs in sport? Some might select Serena Williams for her twenty-three Grand Slam tennis titles or Nadia Comăneci for achieving the first ‘perfect ten’ in gymnastics. Historians might choose Alice Milliat, who organised a Women’s Olympiad in the 1920s, at a time when the founder of the Olympics, Baron […]
The NASA website shows how far the space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have travelled from Earth since their launch in 1977. At the time of writing, Voyager 1 is 13,487,119,000 and Voyager 2 11,147,711,000 miles away. Their primary purpose was to beam back data about the outer planets in our solar system, but […]
The façade of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence is a hidden Renaissance gem. Embedded in a maze of small streets, it’s hard to get a proper perspective; those who make the effort usually know their architectural history. This harmonious marriage of classical architecture to the civic philosophy of humanism was the brainchild of Leon Alberti, […]
Clare Hunter tops and tails her book about the long history of textile work, of stitching, embroidering and quilting, with a visit to the Bayeux Tapestry in Normandy and to The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s 1970s feminist installation in the Brooklyn Museum. Both works are very large – the Bayeux Tapestry an astonishing 230 feet […]
From Marley & Me to Old Yeller, most books about owning a dog are pretty mawkish affairs, a cynical tug at your heartstrings as you follow the journey from cute puppy to faithful friend to tearful final farewell at the canine equivalent of Dignitas. But this memoir, about a coked-up journalist who only finds true […]
Over a century after its legendary premiere in Paris in 1913, Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring remains an essential work of modernism. It has been performed on numerous occasions across the world and has been recorded more than 150 times; it has been bastardised and plagiarised in the scores for such films as Fantasia […]
Last June, Tim Waterstone was awarded a knighthood for ‘services to bookselling’. But what is bookselling nowadays? The walk-in system, which has endured since William Caxton sold his wares in his Westminster shop, is now being crushed between the Scylla of Amazon and the Charybdis of AbeBooks. ‘What are you going to do about the […]
Not only does Armagh have two cathedrals, but they are both called St Patrick’s. One, belonging to the Church of Ireland, crouches on Druim Saileach (or Willow Ridge). Here, some think, St Patrick built a church in AD 445. The other, the Catholic cathedral, stands half a mile away on Tealach na Licci (or Sandy […]
The starting point for Bee Wilson’s latest book is the fact that we face an unusual crisis in food and eating. No longer are we struggling to grow enough food to feed the world. Instead we have tipped into a situation where we are consuming so much junk food that poor diets have become the […]
When Christopher Logue died in 2011, his modernist interpretation of Homer’s Iliad, War Music, remained unfinished. But in the forty-two years separating Patrocleia (1963) and Cold Calls (2005), respectively its first and final instalments, Logue’s project drew a great deal of admirers, including George Steiner, Louis MacNeice and Henry Miller, to name only a famous […]
Obsessed as we are with blaming Donald Trump for merging demagoguery and celebrity and thus putting paid to liberal democracy, there’s a certain sad comfort in being reminded that he is not entirely a novelty. The orange ogre has a forerunner, though – given his vainglorious egomania – he would probably deny it. As Paolo […]
When the third instalment in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet intruded though my south London letter box, the daffs on the balcony were waning and the tulips were warming up on the touchline to take their place. The book seems to do more or less what the last two did: apply a certain rough magic to the events of the present and the recent past in a
Ian McEwan’s new novel guides us into the foothills of science fiction. The reader is thrust into an alternative vision of the 1980s, ‘the autumn of the twentieth century’. In a parallel dimension more technically advanced than our own, email and the internet have arrived early, Alan Turing is the most famous and influential living […]
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The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner