They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in Iraq and a modern-day Schindler who, as USAID’s only Arabic-speaking American employee, arranged for hundreds of Iraqis to find safe haven in the US. In the process, he developed PTSD, sleepwalked through a hotel window,
In 1994, Matthew De Abaitua, an aspiring writer and student on East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, applies for a job as Will Self’s amanuensis. The first interview is preceded by Self passing De Abaitua a tobacco pouch and a large bag of weed, with the instruction: ‘Make something out of that.’ In the second, they
Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the Nobel. The New York Times rated her ‘one of the most important Japanese writers of her generation’. Tsushima relentlessly quarried her damaged life for her work: she was brought up by her mother after her
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are the words of the bestselling author Matt Haig and though I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I too feel that there is something inherently good about reading. Daniel Kalder has no such illusions. His
When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen Mother shortly after the second world war and asked about his background he apparently chose to remain silent. ‘Pour ne pas compliquer les choses,’ was his own version of the one-sided exchange. Gary, born Roman
Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people are.’ Practicalities (1987) is a series of interviews Duras gave to a young friend with all the questions left out and the interview format effaced. Levy’s book is, similarly, one side of
Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and yearning for — television. Medieval Bodies could be the script for a landmark BBC Four series, while the author of How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain came to prominence as farthingale consultant on programmes
The fateful day five years ago began like any other for the family. A pot of black tea with cardamon seeds sat on the table as Sara roused her youngest children and prepared them for school. But there were tiny clues. Leila, just turned 16 and wearing a floor-length dress, unusually offered to help. Her
‘I voted to stay in a common market. No one ever mentioned a political union.’ It is the complaint of an entire generation — the generation, by and large, that switched its vote between 1975 and 2016. It is also, as Robert Saunders shows in this eloquent history of the earlier poll, based on a
Gina Perry is the eminent psychologist who blew apart Stanley Milgram’s shocking revelations from his 1961 research. Milgram had caused a sensation by alleging that 65 per cent of volunteers had been willing to inflict painful, dangerous electric shocks on others. He drew direct analogies between this ostensible blind obedience to commands to inflict pain/harm
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing the rubber tube; Emily Wilding Davison dying under the King’s horse. We forget their destructive acts aimed at men and property; we remember the more sex-appropriate self-destruction. Fern Riddell’s flawed book is intended as a
