Introversion Has Its Limits

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Essayism’, 8 March 2018

Essayism 
by Brian Dillon.
Fitzcarraldo, 138 pp., £10.99, June 2017, 978 1 910695 41 8
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Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found 
by Bella Bathurst.
Wellcome, 224 pp., £8.99, February 2018, 978 1 78125 776 0
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Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-Four Attempts 
by Brian Blanchfield.
Picador, 181 pp., £9.99, August 2017, 978 1 5098 4785 3
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“... though, publishers have seemed willing to take on and even promote this landlocked genre. Notting Hill Editions, which publishes essays exclusively, has established a prize of £20,000 for an unpublished submission of up to 8000 words. Fitzcarraldo awards a prize of £3000 to a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) not yet taken on by a publisher. There is ...”

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

“... at the bedroom window! The tattered rendition of the Last Post, by a pair of insect-buglers on the hill opposite, didn’t help. A prayer was said; the bouquets deposited; the tremors persisted. I had yet to see any Night of the Living Dead movies at this point; but when I did, back in San Diego a few years later, alone in the cheerless TV ‘den’ of the ...”

‘What kind of people do they think we are?’

James Meek: On Social Housing, 10 September 2026

“... acres of concrete panels, walkways and green space, Southwark Council did a deal with the Notting Hill Housing Trust (now Notting Hill Genesis) to knock it down and rebuild it with a mixture of private and social housing. Earlier this year, with the project nowhere near complete, the council and NHG parted ways, leaving the ...”

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

“... in art.One day​ he set out on a walk from the town (he was a good walker), made his way up the hill and along the Poole Road and eventually arrived at the villa at 63 Alum Chine Road, where he rang the bell. Valentine Roch, the Stevensons’ servant, mistook him for a carpet dealer who had let them down. First she kept him in the vestibule, then sent him ...”

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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“... Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

Maurice Thomson’s War

Perry Anderson, 4 November 1993

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653 
by Robert Brenner.
Cambridge, 734 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 521 37319 0
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The Nature of the English Revolution 
by John Morrill.
Longman, 466 pp., £32, June 1993, 0 582 08941 7
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“... from Notestein through Hexter, and the Social Interpretation passing from Tawney through Hill. Ideologically, the consequences can appear marked. English revisionism often looks more unequivocally like a historiographic Right, locked in struggle with a liberal Centre and a socialist Left – where French revisionism tends to occupy both right and ...”

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2012, 3 January 2013

“... home – not that that would have done us any good. We also stayed together most of the day, with Peter Cook, always avid for news, following each new development and often on the phone to London. On the crucial night, as it was thought, I stayed with Dudley Moore in his Midtown apartment. This he later embellished for chat-show consumption as my having ...”

Like a Club Sandwich

Adam Mars-Jones: Aztec Anachronisms, 23 May 2024

You Dreamed of Empires 
by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Harvill Secker, 206 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 78730 380 5
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“... and West Point are not useful frames of reference. Reviewing Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, John Updike singled out a particular detail as seeming to be ‘miraculously recovered’ from the past – the pink dimple left in the flesh of a man’s neck by the collar stud he has been wearing. Chatwin was reaching back a couple of ...”

Among the Private Spies

Vadim Nikitin: Christopher Steele’s Assertions, 2 April 2026

Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy 
by Christopher Steele.
Mariner, 336 pp., £24, October 2024, 978 0 06 337343 3
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“... recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was originally commissioned by a conservative news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon, but ended up being financed by ...”

The poet slams his door

Seamus Perry: Likeable Michael Longley, 9 July 2026

Ash Keys: New Selected Poems 
by Michael Longley.
Cape, 182 pp., £13, July 2025, 978 1 78733 485 4
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“... that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my work”.’ Still, for all Longley’s likeable unpretentiousness, an oeuvre, with the sustained imaginative integrity that implies, is ...”

Across 8 Mile

James Meek: Democrats in Detroit, 5 November 2026

“... rivals says to him: ‘You need to take that white-ass rap back across 8 Mile.’ As Chris Gilmer-Hill, a DSA member who is running as the Democratic candidate for a house seat in the Michigan state legislature, told me, ‘8 Mile historically was the segregation line between Detroit and the segregated suburbs. So you would generally have a large Black ...”

I want to love it

Susan Pedersen: What on earth was he doing?, 18 April 2019

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History 
by Richard J. Evans.
Little, Brown, 800 pp., £35, February 2019, 978 1 4087 0741 8
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“... that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been in the position of the Soviet government, we should have ...”

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

“... far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as a venue for the Olympics,’ stated Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing. Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000-10) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to ...”