Jenny Turner

My feelings about Martin Amis are complicated, as is surely only proper. His latest novel is odd and discontinuous and in the end incoherent, with much stopping and starting, and echoing of previous novels, and quoting from Shakespeare, and other things that might be adduced as evidence of artistic stalling or, alternatively, as developments towards a late style – there’s even a...

‘I had envied them sometimes,’ Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 book about D.H. Lawrence. ‘Those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness.’ He’s sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina,...

I take it, obvious that one of the many things no one particularly needs at the moment is a book that tells you how to save money. And yet here the books are, regardless; and of course I’m going to read them. You never know when you might come across a tip that makes it all seem worth it.

Twilight seems to be a teenage-girl thing – fancy-dress meets, author tours with live rock bands, lots of fanfic and blogging and boy-band screaming – though there is also a middle-aged fan contingent, displaying itself on a website called Twilight Moms: ‘Where Fans at Our Unique Phase of Life (balancing family, work and our Twilight addiction) . . . can gather unashamed of our irrational obsession’.