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Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding obsessions of our times — identity, gender, the meaning of truth — play out through six maddeningly detailed, curiously compelling autofictions. It’s the kind of work that casts a long shadow; any fiction that follows,

How does David Sedaris get away with saying the unsayable?

These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the

Flight into danger: Freight Dogs, by Giles Foden, reviewed

Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to honour the Wright Brothers. ‘I am forever grateful he didn’t go for Orville,’ the Zambian-born author once confided. Smith father and son may well have approved of Giles Foden’s romping novel, which has African bush

T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain

In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction, and that compared with letters and first-hand material, biography is like canned vegetables compared with fresh fruit. We read the letters of writers because they are informal, unguarded, unbuttoned, intimate and candid, revealing not only

Cindy Yu

How China’s economic revolution created billionaires overnight

In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited warning to his communist successors: ‘Whoever doesn’t reform will have to step down! We must let some people get rich first!’ These words were the starting-gun for the country’s opening, and its intense economic reform.

No Samuel Beckett play is set in stone

It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the former chairman of Faber, handed me a volume, published in 1992, of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. He told me that the series was no longer in print and therefore difficult to get hold

Only Iain Sinclair could glimpse Hackney in the wilds of Peru

It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer mapping ley lines between Hawksmoor churches and Ripper tours, skulking around the torque of the M25 and fulminating about the Millennium Dome and the gentrification (and gerrymandering) around the Olympic Stadium. So when I learned

Barça’s golden age and its ruling triumvirate

Even against our better judgment we tend to imbue our sporting heroes with characteristics they may not possess. This can often lead to disappointment. What passes for fluency on the pitch is seldom matched with any articulacy off it. Lionel Messi, arguably the best player of his generation, is no exception. The Argentinian’s inability to

James Bond and the Beatles herald a new Britain

The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street established him as a historian with a confident command of a huge body of information, as bloodless and dry as the subject was. Embarking on Tales of a New Jerusalem, a

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945

They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon to the dyspeptic Michel Houellebecq. But provocation doesn’t always get you where you want to be, as the careers of Richard Millet and Marc-Édouard Nabe demonstrate. Journey to the End of the Night, Céline’s first