However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult
It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and
Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition:
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed
Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she
Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those
Martin Palmer is without doubt one of our leading authorities on the subject of Nature and sacred writing today — among his previous publications being Sacred Gardens and The Sacred History of Britain. One of the primary aims of his latest book is to teach us how to ‘read’ our surroundings; for, he believes, like
