Books
Kyoto is all that is left of Japan – more’s the pity
‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour.…
Who needs a plot? asks Anne Tyler
Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown…
‘T’ is for Trotskyite
Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as…
A melancholy talent with a genius for send-up – Flann O’Brien was his own worst enemy
It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence…
Turn off and tune out
All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have…
Can a paedophilic relationship ever be excused?
Sofka Zinovieff’s new novel, Putney, is an involving, beautifully written, and subtle account of an affair in the 1970s between…
Travel literature
Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the…
Portugal’s entrancing capital has always looked to the sea
Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half…
Beautifully out of sync: All the Lives We Never Lives reviewed
‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist,…
Chopin’s Piano is an eclectic trip through 19th-century romanticism
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a…
Nothing doing
There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao…
First Novels
Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99)…
Caryl Phillips’s new novel manages to make Jean Rhys boring!
The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that…
The Stuart supremacy
Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III,…
Historian David Edgerton says the ‘British nation’ lasted from 1945 to 1979, the miner’s strike its death knell
It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s…
Two new books by barristers chronicle the perilous state of our justice system
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly,…
New York times
Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War.…
100 Best Novels in Translation is a surprisingly sumptious read
Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign…
Why the Romanovs were doomed
The true tragedy of the last Romanovs was a failure of imagination. Both during his last disastrous months in office…
Coach, politician and agony aunt
When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it:…
Telling tall tales
‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first…
Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield
Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar…
Conan Doyle for the Defence tells the fascinating story of Britain’s ‘Dreyfus’
One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat.…
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
Foreign bodies galore: the best new crime fiction
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more…
