Sleep through it

Anne Diebel: Ottessa Moshfegh, 13 September 2018

My Year of Rest and Relaxation 
by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Cape, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2018, 978 1 78733 041 2
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Homesick for Another World 
by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Cape, 277 pp., £9.99, January 2018, 978 1 78470 150 5
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... decades earlier to her liberation from her small-town life and her awkward, angry, unhappy younger self. Her misery is riveting, and we can’t even look away from her laxative-induced bowel movements: ‘torrential, oceanic, as though all of my insides had melted and were now gushing out’. The novels share themes but are written in starkly different ...

Whip with Six Strings

Lucy Wooding: Anne Boleyn’s Allure, 8 February 2024

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe 
by John Guy and Julia Fox.
Bloomsbury, 581 pp., £30, September 2023, 978 1 5266 3152 7
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... while, in darkened rooms, factional rivalries decided policy. This view – too reliant on the self-congratulatory accounts of diplomats, who always believe they are closer to the workings of power than they really are – has been vigorously challenged by any number of historians.Hunting the Falcon is written as though it’s indisputable that the rise ...

I suppose I must have

Sophie Lewis: On Gaslighting, 1 August 2024

On Gaslighting 
by Kate Abramson.
Princeton, 217 pp., £20, May, 978 0 691 24938 4
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... cries out, again and again, ‘I didn’t! I swear I didn’t,’ before her protests give way to self-doubt and depression. ‘I suppose I must have.’ Each time she gives in, Gregory’s face flashes with something like arousal. ‘Yes. YES,’ he says. ‘That’s right: you’re imagining things.’Gregory’s chief motivation isn’t sadism but ...

Dear So-and-So

Ange Mlinko: Caroline Blackwood’s Doubles, 6 February 2025

The Stepdaughter 
by Caroline Blackwood.
McNally Editions, 112 pp., $18, August 2024, 978 1 961341 12 8
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The Fate of Mary Rose 
by Caroline Blackwood.
Virago, 240 pp., £9.99, November 2024, 978 0 349 01904 8
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... Renata seems less a character based on a person than a projection of the narrator’s own self-hatred, the two representing a psychic split in which both ageing wife and ugly stepdaughter are duelling aspects of the same person. Similarly, the women in The Fate of Mary Rose (written five years later) are slippery projections of the narrator, a ...

Short Cuts

Jenny Turner: Naomi Klein, 5 October 2023

... contesting ‘conventional monikers of left and right’. Diagonalists, in this typology, mostly self-identify as middle-class and are disproportionately self-employed. Klein is particularly interested in the wellness-anti-vaxxer connection, which she thinks is partly to do with all the yoga teachers going bust over ...

Swagger for Survival

Blake Morrison: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Theft’, 3 April 2025

Theft 
by Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Bloomsbury, 246 pp., £18.99, March, 978 1 5266 7864 5
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... Badar (‘an ex-houseboy turned flunky in a small hotel’) and Karim (a ‘lanky, soft-spoken, self-possessed’ civil servant) there’s Karim’s wife, Fauzia (a ‘composed and tranquil’ teacher and ‘book rat’). For a time, after the non-theft episode, the trio live together. Their struggles are those common to many young people: how to make a ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Three Whole Weeks Alone, 28 May 1992

... set of the head. After a little while something else occurs: the splitting-off of a protoplasmic self that insinuates itself into every part of the flat. Like smoke, it wisps into corners and under sofas, investigating places that are too awkward for the body to go, and which never get dusted. It’s almost like a dance, a floating ...

At the Fine Art Society

Gaby Wood: Avigdor Arikha’s Prints, 23 October 2025

... vacated. A spoon and umbrella have become relics, relayed with delicate attention to tone. The self-portraits, many of which feature facial expressions inspired by Rembrandt’s, extend passing moods beyond their natural lifespan. Arikha depicted so many overcoats that it almost seems a compulsion – it’s hard not to think of those who died of exposure ...

On Richard Siken

Stephanie Burt, 22 January 2026

... Siken’s new work shows him coming to terms with his changed body: ‘I wanted to defend my new self from my old self. I didn’t want to be him anymore. You live on this side now.’ The term ‘disability gain’ refers to the strengths or capacities that can arise from disabled experience. (Many blind people, for ...

Two Poems

Mark Ford, 19 March 1998

... the cracked bark of the peeling plane-trees. * So I planned to get quicker, leaner, braver, more Self-effacing: I’d pick my way between The mounds of junk cast off by warring factions, cleverly Disguised and idly humming. I swam midstream With the freshwater boys, and lounged on rocks At evening. Meanwhile the air slowly thickened With intrigue. Blueprints ...

Visions of Labour

Lawrence Joseph, 18 June 2015

... who owns and controls    the data. That’s what we’re looking at, labour cheap, replaceable, self-replicating, marginal, contracted out    into smaller and smaller units. Them? Hordes of them, of depleted economic, social value,    who don’t count, in any situation, in anyone’s eyes, and won’t count, ever, no matter what happens,    the ...

The Garden Goddess

David Harsent, 29 January 2009

... decide, in the end, to take her advice and forget it. As she turns to favour you with that self-same rose, you might notice how her shoulder blades jut and curve like the folded wings of an angel, how she smells very slightly of civet, how her nose is off-true, as if she had once been the victim of a random attack, how the dark of her eye can bring you ...

Four poems after Callimachus

Stephanie Burt, 6 February 2020

... and carer.The other gods perfect themselves; they choose          their fearsome or awesome self-presentationin detail – whether beautiful or sublime,          violet-lidded, or plaited, or shining hair loose –when they face a congregation.          She can’t, or won’t. She doesn’t have the time.(Aetia, II/48)Zeus (I read here) once ...

Minimalism

David Pears, 19 February 1987

A.J. Ayer 
by John Foster.
Routledge, 307 pp., £12, October 1985, 9780710206022
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Voltaire 
by A.J. Ayer.
Weidenfeld, 182 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78880 9
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Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A.J. Ayer’s ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ 
edited by Graham Macdonald and Crispin Wright.
Blackwell, 314 pp., £27.50, January 1987, 0 631 14555 9
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... of what we say inside and outside philosophy is strictly meaningless. But there is pleasure in self-denial, especially when it involves sweeping away the results of other people’s self-indulgence. Anyway, the book is written with such spirit and dash, that, though it is an attempt to limit our minds, it is ...

Mad John

Gabriele Annan, 28 June 1990

McEnroe: Taming the Talent 
by Richard Evans.
Bloomsbury, 216 pp., £14.99, June 1990, 0 7475 0618 3
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... as he is to opponents whom his antics put off their stroke? McEnroe is a perfectionist, and self-hatred and self-castigation are the obverse side of his perfectionism. Evans tells us that most of his bad language on court is directed against himself, even though some obtuse umpires don’t realise it. At Wimbledon in ...