I am not sure if it’s properly understood quite what a crisis the short story is now in. Superficial signs of success and publicity — such as Alice Munro winning the Nobel, or the establishment of another well-funded prize — are widely mistaken for a resurgence. But what has disappeared — and disappeared quite recently
A few forgotten objects Dad passed on: copperplate pens with long nail nibs, still stained black, one coal-fire red, laid to rest for twenty years in the shed’s office chest; a Monopoly set yanked by a seaman uncle from his sinking merchant ship U-boat torpedoed at the beginning of the second world war, but minus
You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural
Despite it being a well known fact that Antonia Fraser had earthly parents, I had always imagined that she had somehow skipped infancy and emerged instead from a celestial cloud, surrounded by hordes of trumpet-wielding cherubim, a fully-formed Venus in pink and gold and white. Turreted castles, a constant shower of sovereigns, a title, a
In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for the famous Ascension play, arranged by the members of the lay confraternity, the Sant’Agnese. Sitting in the body of the church, Abraham looked up and saw, on top of one end of the huge stone
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion sheep, and a field 1.6 times the area of the EU. Capitalism has spared us this itching, bleating nightmare. But capitalism, Sven Beckert writes in his hair-shirted history, Empire of Cotton, has wrought other horrors.
If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his elephant in Istanbul in the 1500s, The Architect’s Apprentice might be suitable for you. My heart sank slightly when the review copy arrived: a 452-page brick by an Orange-Prize-shortlisted Turkish author and ‘global speaker’ who
‘I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.’ When ‘The Bumper Book of American Foreign Policy’ gets written, General James Mattis’s line to Iraqi leaders after the 2003 invasion will be an obvious choice for the cover blurb, but meanwhile it makes a striking epigraph
