Books
The social cleansing of London — and other capital crimes
You have to get nearly halfway through this book before it starts to show some life. Until that point, as…
Franco’s bloody finale
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Love like Salt: a memoir of music, motherhood and magical thinking
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it…
What makes the white working class angry? Twits like Hsiao-Hung Pai
This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on…
Henry IV: unsightly usurper and megalomaniac
Poor old Henry IV: labelled (probably unfairly) as a leper, but accurately as a usurper, he has been one of…
Hitting rock bottom in LA
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
A senile Putin becomes a parody of his own parody
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…
Aphorisms and the arts: from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and…
A.C. Grayling reduces history to a game of quidditch
The 17th century scores highly — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr
Karl Ove Knausgaard describes nothing happening — wonderfully
It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…
First novel choice: the American connection
At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of…
The Green Man's journey from Nazi to sweetcorn salesman
The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted…
Is China Miéville becoming a bit too inscrutable?
China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author…
Are all moody teenagers potential Columbine killers?
On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado…
Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
T.S. Eliot’s crisis year: exhaustion, hair loss and a wrecked marriage
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
Olivia Laing: homeless and tempest-tossed in the Big Apple
Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…
Tug of war over the world’s heritage
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
Laurence Oliphant: oddest of Victorian oddballs
As an erstwhile obituarist, I pity the poor hack who had to write up the life of Laurence Oliphant —…
David Quantick’s The Mule: lost in the world of translation
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
A mother-son relationship that made me feel sick
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From…
Why has China taken so long to make its mark?
‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to…
Books and arts opener
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Cods wallop
One might hope that as a Hellene, Niki Savva could shed some light on the tragedy of the Abbott government…
