Books
Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Puzzle Pieces: Cowboy Graves, by Roberto Bolaño, reviewed
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Steam trains make a comeback under the guise of heritage
So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s,…
Despotic laws can — even should — be ignored, says Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
Pilgrimage is beginning to resemble any other kind of holiday
Hidden away in the Old City of Jerusalem is a tattoo parlour which has been serving pilgrims for the past…
Haunted by the soft, sweet power of the violin
An extraordinary omission from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is the lyre, the instrument closest…
Two of a kind: Monica Jones proved Philip Larkin’s equal for racism and misogyny
Monica Jones certainly proved Philip Larkin’s equal for racism and misogyny, says Andrew Motion
The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
Marina Warner becomes her mother’s ‘shabti’
There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the…
Alan Duncan rants about ‘idiot’ parliamentary colleagues and Britain’s waning influence
As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan…
A study in vulnerability: The Coming Bad Days, by Sarah Bernstein, reviewed
When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…
Apostle of modernism: Clive Bell’s reputation repaired
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
The problem of the Benin Bronzes will never go away
A book about the looted African art known as the Benin Bronzes begins by clarifying that most of them are…
Beware the woke misogynist
The #MeToo movement isn’t all it seems. More than three years after countless sexual abuse allegations shook the world, the…
A whale of a time with Albrecht Dürer
Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed…
An unsuitable attachment to Nazism: Barbara Pym in the 1930s
Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals
Yuri Gagarin – poster boy of manned space flight
To an observant outsider, the Soviets might have appeared to have developed an oddly intolerant attitude towards stray dogs. Every…
Shock tactics: the flamboyant life of a Hanoverian maid of honour
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
The home life of Shirley Jackson, queen of horror
‘One of the nicest things about being a writer,’ Shirley Jackson once noted in a lecture titled ‘How I Write’,…
Dark days for Britain: London, Burning, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed
Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest…
Spectacular invective: Jonathan Meades lets rip about Boris and Brexit
The title alludes to Jonathan Meades’s first collection of criticism, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, and to the album by…
Ghosts of the past: The Field, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…
Nostalgia for seedy nightclubs reeking of sex and poppers
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
Bob Dylan — from respected young songwriter to Voice of a Generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Back in the magic land of Narnia
Philip Womack 1 May 2021 9:00 am
C. S. Lewis’s enchanting Chronicles of Narniaseries has, in recent years, come under critical fire. It’s racist, sexist, colonialist; blatant…