In the grip of apocalypse angst
Dorian Lynskey lays out the many ways in which we have imagined the world ending – through pandemic, nuclear holocaust, climate change, asteroid impact or, most unnervingly, AI
Fast and furious: America Fantastica, by Tim O’Brien, reviewed
As the avalanche of lies issuing from the White House morphs into the pandemic, Covid becomes in an engine of justice in this rollicking satire on Trumpworld
Why did Truman Capote betray his ‘swans’ so cruelly?
In an effort to arrest his slide into middle-aged bloat, he attempted a ‘Proustian’ novel, but spilling the secrets of the women he claimed to love was social suicide
A doomed affair: Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, reviewed
A young woman and an older, married man fall passionately in love in the last days of the GDR – but abuse and jealousy soon turn things sour
Man on the run: Sugar Street, by Jonathan Dee, reviewed
How long can a fugitive avoid detection after holing up in a city ‘big enough to be anonymous in’?
An avian allegory: Dinosaurs, by Lydia Millet, reviewed
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim,…
The effortless magnetism of Marcel Duchamp
One could compile a fat anthology of tributes to Marcel Duchamp’s charm – especially what one friend called the artist’s…
God is everywhere, sometimes in strange guises, in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads
Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and…
New Yorkers talk the talk
New York in a nutshell? No way. New York in a New York minute? Forget about it. The city contains…
Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?
The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.…
Cheering for Jürgen Klopp: Liverpool FC’s manager can do no wrong
As his biographer, I feel obliged to quote John Updike’s wise sayings — among them the first rule in his…
Cyber apocalypse: The Silence, by Don DeLillo, reviewed
Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel…
French lessons, with tears: inside a Lyonnais kitchen
You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration…
The blistering experience of writing about Samuel Beckett
For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work…
Three dashing Frenchmen captivate Victorian London
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat —…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
