There’s only one naked lady left, going to ruin out there in the fog amid the dahlias and lavender, its pink trumpet flowers wilted and in tatters. There used to be a couple of dozen of...
People have been asking for books to help them since the invention of printing. Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William...
‘Willie Chandran asked his father one day: "Why is my middle name Somerset?”’ So begins Half a Life, the strange and chilling novel that V.S. Naipaul published in 2001 –...
‘Because what’s history?’ a character asks rhetorically in Philip Roth’s astonishing new novel. ‘History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark....
Comedy is the disguised priest who weds every couple, the German writer Jean Paul Richter said, and in the English novel the greatest of all disguised priests, the comic celebrant of happy...
‘I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows,’ James Gillespie, the persistently apolitical hero of Ronan Bennett’s third novel, The Catastrophist...
The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think...
Eggshells One year in Washington DC a girl I got to know said she came from Germany. She looked quite like Bardot. And her first name was Brigitte (rhymes with bitter not with sweet) and though...
Hawa, the bar girl to be, was born in a village in Ghana in the early 1950s. Her family were emigrants from Upper Volta, which is now called Burkina Faso. When she was three her mother died, and...
The first English translation of a novel by Sándor Márai, Embers, came out in 2001. It had been published in Hungary in 1942, but next to nothing was known in the West about its...
On Pharos Four hollows and four seal-skins on the beach, by a cave, their stink undercut by the faint scent of ambrosia; some tracks, of wild boar and panther; the scales of a serpent; the hair,...
I happened to read Michael Barber’s rather off-beat and amusing biography of Anthony Powell while waiting for a delayed easyJet flight from Stansted to Belfast and enduring all the usual...
In Like a Fiery Elephant, his recent biography of B.S. Johnson,* Jonathan Coe writes feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English...
Her name is Hannah Luckraft, and she is an alcoholic. Not that the narrator of A.L. Kennedy’s latest novel would ever tell you that herself. This isn’t because she’s in denial...
It’s a good time to be a Muslim writing about ‘the trouble with Islam’, to borrow the title of a recent jeremiad by Irshad Manji, a Pakistani-Canadian lesbian feminist. Readers...
Toucans Meanwhile in Costa Rica the volcano smokes Toucans glide down to the banana plantation – For the moment everything is relaxed. It is snowing in Michigan, but I’m thinking Of...
David Peace’s first novel, Nineteen Seventy Four (1999), was set in West Yorkshire in the year of its title, and presented that time and place in apocalyptic terms. ‘These are violent...
Since the Modernist revolution, writing has been seen as an intensely private activity, a view which might have come as something of a surprise to Chaucer or Pope. For liberals such as Henry...