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…
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