There’s a doubleness to the act of volunteering. On the face of it, by freely offering to do something you’re acting as an autonomous agent. But in practice, the act of volunteering is very often a response to something beyond your control: the poverty that necessitates charity, the global conflicts that demand recruits, and so […]
The intricate knowledge of Romeo and Juliet displayed in David Nicholls’s latest novel supports my theory that the play was a profound influence on his blockbuster comic weepy One Day, published in 2009. Both One Day and Romeo and Juliet start off as romantic comedies, with the result that when death sunders the star-crossed lovers […]
Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is routinely and predictably compared with Le Carré, and it’s a comparison that both holds up very strongly and doesn’t hold up at all. It holds up strongly in the
Towards the end of Ron Howard’s documentary Pavarotti, the grandiloquent tenor’s first wife – who supported him before his career began, bore him three daughters in four years and was then left at home to answer his fan mail as he toured the world in the company of more nubile groupies – sadly takes stock […]
The ‘stars’ of this book’s title are Russia’s golden-age writers. The ‘mud’ is Russian life, from the 19th century to the present. The implication is that most Russians live in the latter but have the option of reaching for the former. Over the course of several years, Sara Wheeler (sometime explorer of Greece, Chile and […]
Johny Pitts’s otherness isn’t straightforward. The son of Richie Pitts, a notable African-American performer who arrived in Britain to join the Northern Soul movement, graduated to the West End stage and ended up making his life in Britain, Johny grew up in Sheffield’s Firth Park. As a black northerner, he expresses frustration at what he […]
In one of the great coincidences of history, Samuel Johnson Jr – no relation to his English namesake – compiled America’s first dictionary. The first American dictionary, however, was produced by Noah Webster, born one year after Johnson and a few miles south of him on a farm near Hartford, Connecticut. Hot-blooded and indefatigable, Webster […]
In 1510 a wealthy Japanese man called Sue (pronounced Sué) Saburō took possession of a magnificent album of paintings and calligraphy illustrating The Tale of Genji. He had commissioned it for his father, Sue Hiroaki, then governor of the province of Hyōgo (now Kobe) and a famous scholar. A few years later Hiroaki had the […]
The bibliography of Philip Mansel’s new life of Louis XIV is as impressive as I expected it to be. It lists every kind of history and biography, as well as unpublished manuscripts, newspapers of the period and a great many of the famously entertaining letters and diaries of France’s ‘Grand Siècle’. All of this speaks […]
Among the Indian novelists who arrived on the world stage after the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Amitav Ghosh has long stood out for the range and consistency of his work. Indian novelists writing in English for the most part publish little. Gun Island is Ghosh’s ninth novel – more than Rohinton Mistry, Vikram […]
One doesn’t need modern tools of computational analysis to determine that the most common words in Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses are ‘mama’ and ‘papa’. The stories it contains of the Belarussian, Russian and Ukrainian children who encountered the Nazi invasion in June 1941 are unavoidably tied to the experiences of their parents. Despite the adult […]
The failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 by a group formed mainly of aristocratic army officers remains one of the Second World War’s most controversial episodes. The view of the conspirators as doomed heroes sacrificed to the rage of a vindictive tyrant was challenged at the outset by those who claimed that they […]
Any book with the title The Bell of Treason should be a warning to us that we are about to read a morality tale. While ‘Munich’ – the Munich conference of 1938 – has long been a byword for appeasement, it has also often been represented as a classic case of international treachery, one in […]
Almost certainly the first question that will be asked about this giant volume is why we need another biography of Hitler. After Volker Ullrich’s recent biography and in the shadow of Ian Kershaw’s magisterial two volumes there has to be good reason for a further exploration of Hitler’s life on this scale, historical celebrity though […]
‘When I hear the word culture I reach for the safety-catch of my Browning.’ These words, often attributed to Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, were actually spoken by a character in Schlageter, a drama by Nazi playwright Hanns Johst. First performed in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the play was dedicated to him. […]
T S Eliot has been having a rotten time of it here lately. Intellectuals and scholars are once again flogging the dead horse of his anti-semitism, in reaction to Christopher Ricks’s new study, T S Eliot and Prejudice, and an eminent Yale academic has just published a book villainising him for betraying this country’s native […]
Over the course of her 26-year writing career, Nicola Barker has defied categorisation. Is she a naturalist who produces subtle portraits of society’s loners and losers or a madcap surrealist with a mystical streak? Is she the most earnest of writers or a subversive piss-taker in the postmodern mode? And is she a pillar of […]
Imagine if you asked a friend ‘how’s life?’ and got the response, ‘In general it’s about a 3.7 star rating. Some days are more like 4.4 or 4.5 but then others go down to 2.8 so I’d say the aggregate is mid- to high 3s.’ Welcome to Zed, Joanna Kavenna’s sixth novel, about a dystopia […]
Like any landscape after a flood, everything looks different since the advent of the #MeToo movement. Contours have shifted, new lines have been drawn. Of course, changes were afoot long before Harvey Weinstein was smoked out of his Hollywood penthouse. Fourth-wave feminism has been in the ascendant for some years now, making
An investigation into the ‘resilience of the human mind without society’, Herbert Powyss decides early in 1793, will make a significant contribution to human knowledge – one which will impress the renowned Royal Society in London, to whom he has already submitted papers on horticultural matters. As a Herefordshire landowner familiar with radical movements in […]
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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