Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on
The cover design of this tract-length book associates it with David Baddiel’s excellent Jews Don’t Count (2021), which exposed a prejudice infecting both ends of the political spectrum. The God Desire resembles its precursor in other ways. Wit and dry humour abound. But as a verdict on the human appetite for the divine, it is
This is a rather odd book and, I regret to say (given the reading that seems to have gone into it), not a very good one. If one had little knowledge of the reign of King Edward VII, or of the jokes, anecdotes and scandals of that period, then it might serve as a useful
Beneath a flinty church tower deep in the Kent marshes, ‘among putrid estuaries and leaden waters’, lies a monument to an Elizabethan man of business. It is not much to look at. David Howarth calls it ‘second rate… dull’ and ‘strangely provisional’, despite its expanse of glossy alabaster. Moreover, the name of the man commemorated
Catherine Lacey’s new book is the second literary novel I’ve read recently to radically rewrite American history. In last year’s To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara imagined a different outcome for the Civil War: the Confederate states secede to become the thoroughly racist ‘United Colonies’. Up north are several political unions, such as the ‘Free States’ (including
‘What are you like with enclosed spaces?’ Tom asks his sister Billie before they head into the maze of tunnels under Paris. Away from the ‘tourist bit’ of the catacombs – the part filled with bones moved from the city’s cemeteries – is an extensive network of claustrophobic pathways beneath the everyday, visible level of
The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from
Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir. On several occasions, Russia accepted Nato membership for the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled
It’s a little-remembered fact that the Indian subcontinent once had the world’s largest Muslim population. Numbering 95 million, they were almost a quarter of India’s total population. Partition in 1947 still left them as the world’s largest Muslim minority, at 15 per cent of Hindu-majority India. More than 70 years later, no single study has
Our ruined attention spans seem to be the consequence of a recent fall from grace. Big Tech was our tempter. Having tasted its dopamine, we got hooked on its likes and notifications. Even Thoreau got bored with practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond But while the digital attention economy is new, the struggle
Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book. Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters
We never quite make it to Battersea Park. By the time the narrator and his husband reach its gates, it’s time for them, and us, to return home. The narrator is a writer, living just that little bit too far away from the park, inspired by eeriness of the Covid lockdown regime but also horribly
The professional performer is the tree in the philosopher’s human forest. If there’s no opportunity to sing or act or dance in front of an audience, are they still a performer at all? In the spring of 2020, when most of his colleagues shrugged and started making banana bread, the tenor Ian Bostridge took an
In January 1559 an Italian envoy wrote of Elizabeth I’s coronation that ‘they are preparing for [the ceremony] and work both day and night’. More than four and a half centuries later much the same could be said of the imminent investiture of Charles III – an event overshadowed, at the time of writing, by
Kelly Link’s latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to a same-sex version of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and
‘I have… found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into
In the conclusion to this forensically detailed book, the authors, one a naval historian, the other a retired naval officer who served in the Oscarsborg fortress outside Oslo – the cornerstone of the story – during the Cold War, ask: ‘What would have happened if Hitler had not unleashed his dogs of war on Norway
Every family has its folklore. Apparently, as a five-year-old, I was on the floor playing when I looked up at my grandmother and told her matter-of-factly that she ‘was not the kind of granny I had been expecting’. I’m not quite sure what my foetal presumptions had been, but she is far from the hackneyed
The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to
Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this: Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written
