In October 1920, Gaito Gazdanov, then a young soldier, returned to his armoured train in the Crimea to find that it had been captured by the Red Army. He escaped in November by crossing the...
Not everyone likes Geoffrey Hill. There have been tedious arguments about his ‘difficulty’, about whether that difficulty has become hermetic obscurity in his later work, about his...
The town that ‘doesn’t need another silly love song’, and gets ‘You Look Like I Need a Drink’. * Next to the deleted cigarette on the barroom door: the red crossed...
Nathan Filer seems, by all accounts, a very nice man. Despite being given a six-figure advance from HarperCollins for his first novel, getting glowing reviews, winning the Costa Book Award and...
The early 21st century brought a new type of American novel. Its best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon,...
Though the most popular British detectives have nearly all been posh men, the early detectives weren’t. Almost sixty years before women were hired as police officers, the first female detectives, Mrs...
‘As weary academic Egyptologists often explain,’ Roger Luckhurst says, ‘Ancient Egyptian culture actually had very little concept of the curse.’ The real mystery that he has set out to solve has...
The Welkin We’re patching up an agreement today. The insides won’t let us. I sent you copies by return mail any time soon. We came to a long Q and A period, to which dreams are the...
Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was...
The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands.
One of the curiosities of German literature is a spirited little pamphlet called Pope ein Metaphysiker!, which appeared anonymously in Berlin bookshops in 1755. The argument is tendentious,...
Ode to Prism. Aria. Untitled. Wait. I wait. Have you found me yet. Here at my screen,...
‘What a bitch of a thing prose is!’ Flaubert complained in a letter to Louise Colet while at work on Madame Bovary. ‘It is never finished; there is always something to be done...
In 1888 the Folies-Bergère presented a play called Presse-Ballet, featuring a cast of dancing newspapers and magazines. ‘Le Figaro, Gil Blas, L’Evénement and Le Gaulois...
Just as some faces are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated,...
The Bench What passed through your mind, old man, what passed through your mind back then, staring out beyond the shingle and sea wrack, the islets and rocks, to the Olympics on the far shore,...
Jameson finds affect in the profusion of Zola’s France, the streets, the shops, the light, the crowds, the objects and animals, and his amazing examples – dead fish in a market, an array of cheeses,...
‘Morning dearie’. Bond heaved himself awake. A set of teeth was grinning at him from the glass next to his bed. He was in an Innov8 2000 Profiling Hospital Bed with full electronic...