‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to
Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip
At first I thought this was going to be a terrible book. It starts like a Hollywood B-movie Western on which Ingmar Bergman has done a quick rewrite. This, for example, is how the authors convey the simple fact that Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658: ‘Death finally caught up with Oliver Cromwell on
Yes, shamefully, I did immediately look myself up in the index, since I had known Mary Robinson (née Bourke) when we were both young feminists in Dublin in 1970. Indeed, she sat in my Dublin flat sharing ‘conscious-raising’ sessions, and I published one of the first political interviews with her — which has been cited
We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the
Starting with Lemprière’s Dictionary — an unexpected worldwide hit in the early 1990s — Lawrence Norfolk has never been a man for the slim novella. Complicated of plot and huge of cast, his books generally serve up a combination of almost obsessively researched history and somewhat arcane mythology. Now, 12 years since his last one,
In this intense, painful, excellent war novel, former Private John Bartle, a young man from rural Virginia, looks back on his tour of duty in northern Iraq in 2004. He tries to explain what it was like to kill, and what it was like to be under fire. He tries to make sense of the
It is fashionable, in the wake of all those rowers and cyclists and runners, abled and otherwise, who do what they do for something — glory, pride, joy of physical exertion? — other than for money, to disparage football, and to regard it as somehow vulgar and its practitioners over-indulged. Despite the fairytale exploits of
I was sheltering in the dunes on a Hebridean beach, reading this book, when I happened to glance up and see an otter galumphing out of the machair and down onto the sand, 20 yards off. Long, hump-backed and shiny, it was the first wild otter I had ever seen. Such is the talismanic power
Having fried your leeks in butter, form them into a poultice and apply it to your backside. No, not Heston Blumenthal’s latest wheeze: instead the cure for piles advocated by William Buchan, 18th-century author of Domestic Medicine, now republished as Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? (Bodleian Library, £14.99). The new title gives you a clue to
Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically
Sarah Losh is not forgotten (as the subtitle of this book suggests) in her own village of Wreay (pronounced ‘Rear’), south east of Carlisle in Cumberland. The locals refer to ‘Miss Sarah’ as if she were still alive, rather as they speak about Lady Anne Clifford at Appleby. Anybody who has visited the village and
Blondes, brunettes, ginger nuts, I’ve had ’em all, sunshine. Could be Janet the cleaner or that Irish cook at the day nursery. A dead cert’s Aunty Pat. What Aunty Pat? His wife puts two and two together. But in the back of his minivan? Unsnaring her heel from his bosun’s chair, ruining her Wolford’s on
Broken Harbour (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) is Tana French’s fourth novel in a series based around Dublin’s murder squad. Despite the format, she rings the changes by using a different lead character in each book. Here it’s a detective named ‘Scorcher’ Kennedy, a man who chases murderers with a monastic sense of vocation and a
Howard Jacobson’s new novel is a satire on modern literary publishing seen through the eyes of a writer, Guy, who wants to sleep with his mother-in-law even though he’s married to a stunner famed for her casseroles and ‘street blow jobs’ (that’s what it says). Things happen in it not to feed the story but
Early on in this fascinating history Stephen Alford makes an important point: because Elizabeth I and the settlement between monarchy, church and state survived, because the threat of foreign invasion was thwarted or failed to materialise, and because the sense of national identity fostered by the Tudors proved robust, we see that first Elizabethan age
Rosemary Ashton has always been fascinated by the ways in which ideas ‘materialise’. Her first book, The German Idea, tracked the subtle filaments of Germanism in 19th-century British culture. In this, her latest book, she anatomises an area of London where more formative ideas have been conceived, and brought to fruition, than in any other
In 1904, the great Halford Mackinder, founder of the modern academic discipline of geography, published one of the most subversive maps of the century. It might seem unlikely that a scientific representation of the physical world projected according to mathematical principles onto a two-dimensional surface could mess with your head, but that is the unmistakable
In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of
Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral home and Bechdel’s dawning realisation of her own lesbianism. The comic book does not immediately suggest itself as the ideal format for material of such