Xenophilia is as English as Stilton. Despite a reputation for insularity, no other nation has produced so many writers who have immersed themselves in other countries. From Borrow to Lawrence, Byron to Auden, the list is impressive. In one of the wonderful letters quoted in this perceptive, haunting and highly readable biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Caitlin Moran’s bestselling How to be a Woman careered with reckless frivolity from the personal (eldest of eight, home-schooled in a council house in Wolverhampton) to the political (better pornography, larger pants, more body hair). Her latest effort, Moranthology (Ebury Press, £18.99) casts a retrospective glow of gravity over its predecessor. That was a manifesto
This book isn’t just about prediction, or even the limits of knowledge. It is about the ascent of man. According to Nate Silver, the American electoral analyst, the digital age and its explosion of knowledge constitute a great turning point in human history. Never before have we had so much evidence on which to base
My father, a man not given to hero-worship, once told me that the only actor he really admired was Richard Burton. Some years later, I put the question to Peter O’Toole, who had been reading excerpts from his lushly overwritten memoirs at the Oxford Union. ‘Mr O’Toole,’ I said, ‘I was wondering if…’ A shy
He comes most nights — I hear his car pull up Outside and catch the glancing blur of lights Through curtains. Drinking Nescafe, we watch The Epilogue, laugh at the priest, then think Where to drive that night — we catalogue The usual suggestions and arrive At the same decision as usual. The road lies
T.C. Boyle is not one of those authors who can be accused of writing the same novel again and again. Over the past 30 years, his subject matter has ranged from 18th-century Africa to the California of the future, from Mexican immigration to the sex life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Even so, what has tended
L’Arénas, between Côte d’Azur airport and a dual carriageway patrolled by prostitutes, is a banal stretch of concrete, steel and glass offices, malls and hotels that seems always to be deserted. A few weeks ago, I watched an 18-month-old Korean boy playing on an iPad by a hotel pool there. ‘Ballardian’ was le mot juste.
What must Mao have thought when in 1968 he heard that towering intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre were enthusiastically distributing newspapers on the prosperous boulevards of Paris bearing his portrait and eulogising his ideas? By then Mao, along with most Chinese, knew that just six years earlier his attempt to create a Marxist utopia in the
Say ‘Colditz’, and the name immediately triggers an image of prisoners of war digging tunnels, building gliders and in general plotting outrageously to cross the barbed wire into freedom. You could shout ‘Trent Park’ from the rooftops and, until now, no one would have known what you were referring to. But this book should give
