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Mystery in everyday objects

‘The surest and quickest way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object.’ Cesare Pavese wrote those words in Dialogues with Leucò, one of two quotations that preface Lara Pawson’s deceptively slim third book, Spent Light. When her dog starts killing squirrels, Pawson cooks them, acquiringa Whitby

Tanya Gold

The strangeness of Charles III

There are two narratives in Robert Hardman’s Charles III. The first is an account of the King’s first year on the throne. This is superbly researched and fascinating. We learn, for instance, that when Queen Elizabeth II died, the state trumpeters were on a plane to Canada and the bearer party was in Iraq. (Their

How Liverpool soon outgrew the Beatles

‘If any journalist asks you about the Beatles because you’re from Liverpool, say you hate them and you don’t listen to that old crap.’ Such was the advice that the DJ Roger Eagle, promoter and founder of the legendary (and there really is no other word for it) Merseyside punk club Eric’s, dispensed to a

Life is a far richer, more complicated affair than we imagined

In 1982, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested that ‘science may be described as the art of systematic simplification’. In this mind-stretching book, Philip Ball seems to wish to prove Popper’s statement both wrong and correct. On the one hand, Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also

Flirting in 15th-century Florence

Noel Malcolm, a former political columnist of The Spectator, the historian of English nonsense verse and editor of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, has written a book on an arresting subject. Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe gives close and relentless scrutiny to male-male sexual relations in Europe, the Ottoman empire, north Africa and in such dispersed

Dangerous secrets: Verdigris, by Michele Mari, reviewed

In everyday life – on a garden path, flowerpot or lettuce – I back rapidly away from slugs. I didn’t expect to confront them in literature, but in Michele Mari’s Verdigris they are present in abundance, from the first line: Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then

Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed

One Friday evening in a half-ruined, half-rebuilt city, where smart tourists dine out in restaurants next to refugees in makeshift shelters, a woman walks the streets. In torn clothes and slippers ‘worn ragged’, she hands out leaflets. On every piece of paper the same words are written: ‘Has anyone seen my daughter?’ On the same

A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed

The Appalachians have become fashionable fictional territory. Following Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Demon Copperhead comes Jayne Anne Phillips’s Night Watch. Like Cold Mountain, it is set largely in the aftermath of the American civil war, but, for all its wealth of detail, it is less a historical account than

Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

The Vulnerables represents Sigrid Nunez’s foray into pandemic literature, a genre we can only expect to see grow in the coming years. The topic is handled with a level of absurdity, making elements of the story eerily (and sometimes traumatically) recognisable. Nunez’s musings on how writing can represent the strangeness of life are never more

The summer I dwelt in marble halls

The discovery of a cache of long-lost love letters might be an over-familiar inspiration for a memoir, risking a bit of a dusty lane indulgence – a charming, nostalgic featherbed flop into a past romance. But although the events described by this delightful nonagenarian first-time author took place three-quarters of a century ago, there is

Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed

Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married

Hanif Kureishi – portrait of the artist as a young man

If any novelist, playwright or screenwriter of the past 40 years could be called ‘a writer of consequence’, to use the literary agent Andrew Wylie’s term, it would be Hanif Kureishi. While not shifting units on the scale of his near contemporaries Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, Kureishi’s cultural influence – through his

Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923

The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a ‘wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations’. It offered ‘the only solution to the great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails, then all else fails.’ Stirring words – and not those of some sentimental Colonel

She’s leaving home: Breakdown, by Cathy Sweeney, reviewed

The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s first novel has finally cracked. I say ‘finally’ because there have been signs: drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend’s son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died. But in the beginning we don’t know