About halfway through reading this collection of essays I had one of those hall-of-mirrors moments. These are mostly book reviews, you see: high-toned, long-form New York Review of Books-type review-essays, given — but book reviews nevertheless. There I was, dutifully noting what David Lodge wrote about what Martin Stannard had to say about Muriel Spark,
John Keay’s excellent new book on the modern history of South Asia plunges the reader head first into some wildly swirling currents. Here are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a supporting cast of mini-states present and past that you may not even have heard of, all tumbling, overlapping, in
It is six years since Hanif Kureishi’s last novel Something to Tell You, a kaleidoscopic meditation on life and death seen through the eyes of a Freudian analyst striving to make sense of middle age. It was regarded as a return to the highs of The Buddha of Suburbia, Kureishi’s first and still best-loved novel,
Adam Foulds’s latest novel is less successful than its predecessor. In 2009 he reached the Booker shortlist with The Quickening Maze, which saw Victorian poets orbit a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest. Now, with In the Wolf’s Mouth, he has shifted his attention to the Mediterranean theatre of the second world war. Will Walker is
John Steinbeck (1902–1968), an ardent propagandist for the exploited underdogs of the Great Depression, had barely enough money for subsistence during the years he spent preparing and writing The Grapes of Wrath, the protest novel regarded as his masterpiece. It made him a Nobel laureate and a very rich man. The Nobel committee praised his
A book about one of the London clubs, published to mark its 250th anniversary, might be regarded as of extremely limited public appeal, designed only for the enjoyment of its members, 800 of whom have subscribed more than 900 copies (one blenches to think why members might want more than one copy). But Brooks’s, halfway
As I sit here in my Sarah Lund Fair Isle sweater, polishing my boxed sets of Borgen and nibbling on a small piece of herring, it briefly occurs to me that perhaps I too have fallen victim to the prevailing mania for all things Scandinavian. Just about the only person who’s stayed resistant, it seems,
Reporting Egypt’s revolution three years ago, I had a sense of history not so much repeating itself as discharging sparks which seemed eerily familiar. Smoke was billowing into my hotel bedroom from the building next door, the headquarters of the Mubarak dictatorship which protestors had set alight; yet also visible from my balcony in Cairo
James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird is set in the mid 19th century, and is based on the real life of John Brown, the one who lies a-mouldering in his grave. Recently it won a National Book Award in the USA. Brown, the Old Man, was a religious fanatic who believed that he had the
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war. How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards
I am halfway across a bridge and midway through my life, staring at the midday sun. How I love politics! I recall hearing debates over there in the Commons, and I know that democracy is about working days like this, taxpayers in trucks and buses, the business of pleasure boats, foreign policy of tourists and
