Books
The nature of genius
On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome…
What the secretary saw
What the secretary sawSarah Churchwell Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of the Jazz Age by Althea McDowell AltemusUniversity of…
Tricks of the trades
Oddly enough, one of the most historically influential pieces of British writing has turned out to be an essay that…
The classic that conquered the world
Somewhere between his first and second drafts, Victor Hugo decided to change the title of his great novel from Les…
Everyday unhappiness
This is an extraordinarily compelling novel for one in which nothing really happens but everything changes. Sara Baume’s narrator is…
Bedside manners
‘A tricky part of my job,’ the GP said, scrolling through the next patient’s notes, ‘is breaking good news.’ As…
Three’s a crowd
James Lasdun’s latest novel, billed as a psychological thriller, opens in Brooklyn in the summer of 2012. Charlie and his…
The game of life
In the introduction to his new book Steven Johnson starts out by describing the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices and…
Inbuilt obsolescence
Once upon a time, Australian politics was known for its stability. Long periods of one party or another in office,…
Intimations of mortality
In Deaths of the Poets two living examples of the species, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, retail the closing…
Flights of fancy
Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s…
Bad behaviour
Molly Keane achieved fame and critical acclaim in 1981 aged 75, when she published the novel Good Behaviour, a razor-sharp…
Recent crime fiction
There isn’t a clear line separating crime and literary fiction, but a border zone where ideas are passed from one…
Old, unhappy, far off things
August Geiger led an unremarkable life. Born in 1926, the third of ten children of a Catholic farming family in…
A diamond set in sapphires
I was a young, aspiring writer when I decided to leave everything behind and move to Istanbul more than two…
A disgrace to feminism
‘I was single, straight, and female,’ Emily Witt begins, with all the élan of an alcoholic stating her name and…
The Baron is back
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had his Polish ancestor not been exiled to…
Thirtysomething blues
If ever there was a book for our uncaring, unsharing times, it is Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, in which Neve,…
Righter of wrongs
I used to work for Ludo, as we all knew him on BBC2’s Did You See?, and was once thought…
Cheating death
2016 was probably the year even the most optimistic of us — those who can genuinely square the new populist…
Righter of wrongs
I used to work for Ludo, as we all knew him on BBC2’s Did You See?, and was once thought…
Cheating death
2016 was probably the year even the most optimistic of us — those who can genuinely square the new populist…
Flights of fancy
Michael Chabon’s back. He’d never gone away, of course — more than a dozen books in all — but it’s…
Thirtysomething blues
If ever there was a book for our uncaring, unsharing times, it is Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, in which Neve,…
Recent crime fiction
There isn’t a clear line separating crime and literary fiction, but a border zone where ideas are passed from one…
