Christopher Tayler

On the one hand, it’s clearly part of Anna Burns’s project in Milkman to redescribe the Troubles without using such terms as ‘the Troubles’, ‘Britain’ and ‘Ireland’, ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’, ‘RUC’ and ‘IRA’. On the other, the narrator’s mad, first-principles language, with its abundance of phrases in inverted commas and sudden changes of register, is also used to describe the inner world of a young woman with no idea whom to tell, and no templates for what she might say, when she’s stalked and groomed by a powerful older man. The public-political and the personal-political aren’t easily disentangled, and there’s no reason that they should be. But the plot complicates the reader’s – and the narrator’s – sense of the way they interact.

Enric Marco​, an energetic pensioner with time on his hands, joined the Amical de Mauthausen, an association of Spanish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, in 1999. To the elderly Republican deportados and their heirs who ran the outfit on a shoestring from an attic in Barcelona, he soon came to seem a useful person to have around. Under Franco the Amical had been a clandestine...

Some people​ don’t like the idea that they may be living in a metropolitan bubble, but René Unterlinden, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s latest book, has been raised to call the bubble his home. ‘De point is,’ his father – not the only character in the novel with a comic accent – tells him, ‘we like de bubble, and so do you … So dis...

James Joyce​ resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care...

Roland​ Barthes met Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on 9 December 1976 at a lunch hosted by Edgar Faure, the president of the National Assembly, at the Hôtel de Lassay. Michel Foucault had turned down Faure’s invitation as a protest against Giscard’s failure to put an end to the death penalty, and the left-wing figures who went anyway were later subjected,...