Books
Things fall apart in Denis Johnson’s latest novel of madness and anarchy in Sierra Leone
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one…
Studio Portrait
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting, très debonaire. This…
Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
Dominic Cummings (who ought to know) is not impressed by Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former adviser and self-styled ‘delivery man’
In 2001, Tony Blair took Sir Michael Barber from his perch as special adviser in the Department for Education and…
John Maynard Keynes: transforming global economy while reading Virginia Woolf
To the 21st-century right, especially in the United States, John Maynard Keynes has become a much-hated figure whose name is…
Books and arts
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For the Time Being
Time slips away while we conjecture how to make best use of it. Waking late, the hours already sliding by,…
Studio Portrait
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting,très debonaire. This could…
For the Time Being
Time slips away while we conjecture how to make best use of it. Waking late, the hours already sliding by,…
Studio Portrait
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting,très debonaire. This could…
Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters
James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night
Love child or bastard: the lottery of being born on the wrong side of the blanket
My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass…
Life in the LA ghetto was nasty, brutish and short — until one brave detective took on the gangs
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit.…
The art of political biography remains in intensive care if Giles Radice’s latest book is anything to go by, says Simon Heffer
With the odd exception — I think principally of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher — the genre of political…
Why the cheating cuckoo may finally be getting its comeuppance
In recent years there has been a fashion for so-called ‘new nature writing’, where the works are invariably heavy with…
Symbolism and a man called U: more avant-garde fiction from Tom McCarthy
In a 2008 essay Zadie Smith held up Tom McCarthy’s austere debut Remainder as a bold exemplar of avant-garde fiction,…
Not Mister Jones!
My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones,…
British colonialism is once again under attack in Aatish Taseer’s sprawling Indian epic
Early in the second section of Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were we are presented with a striking description of…
Ray Davies: part of Swinging Sixties London — and apart from it too
As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since…
Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
Monstrous, beautiful, damaged people make for tiresome company in Polly Samson’s The Kindness
Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a…
Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
Stuck at K: we know very little about vitamins except that they’re good for us (in small quantities)
Before I read this book about vitamins, I thought I knew what it would be like. It would be vaguely…
All in the name of science: three young naturalists go on an Amazonian killing-spree
John Hemming is our greatest living scholar-explorer. He is best known for his extraordinary first book The Conquest of the…
This terrifying book puts me off going online ever again —except maybe to Ocado — says India Knight
India Knight 21 March 2015 9:00 am
Jeremy Clarkson has been getting it in the neck from Twitter’s (I was going to say) tricoteuses — but social…