In a very long Spectator piece late last year Gore Vidal betrayed a certain sense of disappointment with his English critics. The ostensible purpose of the article was to attack Auberon Waugh who had, Vidal claimed, ruined his chances of election to the US Senate by casting damaging aspersions about his sexual habits in an […]
Novelists who set off to commentate on a foreign conflict put their literary reputation at risk. They are tempted to believe that some superior power of insight will more than make up for their lack of local experience and raise them above the status of war tourist. Nobody did more to make the genre suspect […]
For years I’d known that a scathing review of Dr No, the first James Bond film, had been published in Russia. But where? No one could tell me. It was not until I took over the editorship of The Book Collector and made contact with James Bond book dealers that I discovered. The piece, by […]
On 15 November, PEN centres the world over marked the fortieth Day of the Imprisoned Writer by highlighting the cases of several writers and journalists who are imprisoned or facing prosecution. These include Dr Mohammed Al-Roken, an author, academic and human rights lawyer from the United Arab Emirates. According to a recent report by Human […]
My crime novels of the year Phosphate Rocks by Fiona Erskine (Sandstone Press). A fascinating mixture of detection, science and memoir by chemical engineer Fiona Erskine. Beautifully written and clever. Edge of the Grave by Robbie Morrison (Macmillan). This impressive first novel provides a colourful, moving and shocking portrayal of crime and class, deprivation and […]
This breezy noir, set in contemporary Los Angeles, begins with the titular narrator, a private detective named Happy Doll (his real name; some people call him Hank), receiving a visit in his office from an old friend wanting a favour. Lou needs a new kidney but, as a lifelong smoker (‘his open mouth was like […]
Pupa is the first novel by J O Morgan, a Scottish poet who has published seven collections of narrative poems. Set in what Morgan calls an altopia, the characters are human but not as we know it: they must decide if and when to progress to the next stage and transform from larvals into adults.
A friend of mine observed recently that some people tell stories in a way that is ‘all event’. Sammy Wright’s debut novel, Fit, is the novelistic equivalent. It is a fascinating and visceral portrait of child poverty and social division, subjects on which Wright, a teacher and member of the Social Mobility Commission, is a […]
At its core, the gothic novel – like its offspring, the horror film – is a collection of familiar tropes rolled up in a patchwork quilt of tension and unease. Sally Hinchcliffe’s Hare House begins ticking gothic boxes on the very first page, where the unnamed, unreliable female narrator notes that names have been changed […]
Two women going away to realise their creative projects; two small islands within a short distance of each other; two narratives running in parallel until they converge on an uncertain ending. Such is the basis of Alison Moore’s engaging fifth novel, in which things recur, mirror and nestle within one another, filling the pages to […]
Dave Eggers’s The Every is a David and Goliath story in which a techno-sceptic infiltrates a digital behemoth in order to destroy it from inside. In writing this novel, Eggers himself seems to be taking on the role of David, using his analogue slingshot to ping rocks off an impervious and often invisible giant. Most […]
The advice for musicians compiling an album – open with your strongest track, knock them out with a killer – can also be applied to short-story collections. If an author’s opening tale doesn’t strike and stun the reader, why should they continue? With her slim debut collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi both has and hasn’t followed the […]
The Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter was an apostle of humanity’s moral, biological and geographical interconnectedness. When a person aids the weak and oppressed, a balance is restored and the helped individual is able to rejoin the social fold, Stifter explained in the preface to his mid-19th-century novella cycle Motley Stones, now available in its first […]
Jadzia, the jealous wolf-girl in Teffi’s story ‘Leshachikha’ (the name of a female forest spirit), causes a gigantic tree to fell her prettier sister and offers a warning of a similar fate to her widowed nobleman father when he fails to reciprocate her passion. Two young sisters – clearly modelled on Teffi and her sibling […]
Alan Garner is best known for the fantasy novels he wrote in the 1960s, which drew on the oral traditions and enchanted landscapes of the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge. These have made him a much-loved and respected voice in modern literature. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, lodged itself strangely in the minds […]
The central figure in Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob is Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish merchant from the eastern borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (today in Ukraine) who left his homeland for the Ottoman Empire and returned a self-proclaimed messiah. The sect that grew around him rejected the Talmud and embraced the kabbalah, espousing […]
A third or so into To Paradise, a terminally ill man who has arranged to end his own life through assisted dying is asked if he is scared. Not of pain, he replies. ‘I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted – how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.’ The sting of mortality, the craving for a legacy, the fallacy of redemption: such are Yanagihara’s preoccupations. Her 2013
In 2006 the BBC conducted a poll of viewers to find Britain’s favourite flower. The rose won hands down, taking 37 per cent of the vote. The nearest contender was the sweet pea, with 29 per cent, while the iris, lily and tulip were way behind. The rose is actually England’s national flower, though not […]
Karl Hermann Wolfgang Scherchen, fondly known as ‘Wulff’, inspired two of Britten’s early masterpieces – Young Apollo, for piano and strings, and ‘Antique’, which saluted the ‘gracious son of Pan’ and was one of Britten’s settings of Rimbaud’s verse that make up the song cycle Les Illuminations. These are indelible monuments to a young male […]
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
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London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk