Interviews

I’ve been trying to think of something – anything – in recent years that has had a bigger effect on the working day of the average writer than Twitter. And I can’t. Writing, for just about everyone who does it professionally, is the act of minimising your number of excuses for not writing. Nigel Farndale’s recent piece in the magazine addressed the problem of views; Julian Barnes, for instance, can only work if he’s facing the blank wall of his study. It reminded me of David Niven, who saw a plane flying over as ‘a bonanza – I’ll watch that for hours’. Eventually he had to retreat to a chair

Richard Murphy was born in County Mayo in Ireland in 1927. He spent part of his childhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) where his father was the last British mayor of Colombo. From the age of eight he attended boarding schools in Ireland and England, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford. In 1959 Murphy moved to Inishbofin, an island off the coast of Connemara in County Galway. He settled there for twenty years, writing poems inspired by tragic tales from the local fishing community. These include ‘The Cleggan Disaster’, ‘The Last Galway Hooker’, ‘Pat Cloherty’s Version of The Maisie’ and ‘Sailing to an Island’. The latter describes a dangerous boating

The Lowland is the magnificent new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, which has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize. It tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who come of age in Calcutta in the late 1960s. ‘Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there,’ writes Lahiri. This was the beginning of a troubled period in West Bengal, as a radical communist movement known as the Naxalite cause swept through the region, inciting idealistic young men, in particular, to violence and acts of terror. While Udayan becomes caught

Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Sen’s previous books include: Development as Freedom; Rationality and Freedom; The Argumentative Indian; Identity and Violence, and The Idea of Justice. In 1998 Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Much of the work done by the Indian economist has focused on poverty, specifically looking at developing new methods to predict and fight famines. His research also discusses ways to measure poverty, so that more effective social programs can be designed to prevent it. Sen has recently co-written a book with fellow economist, Jean Drèze, called An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions.

George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq, a book that received several prizes. Packer’s other non-fiction books include, The Village of Waiting and Blood of the Liberals, the latter winning the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square.  Packer’s latest book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, is a work of non-fiction that attempts to document the massive political and economic changes that have taken place in the last three decades in the United States.  The narrative follows the successes and

Recent convulsions in China’s banks will not, I suspect, have surprised Timothy Beardson, a sinophile, veteran Hong Kong financier and author of Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future. He argues that China’s extraordinary growth over the last 30 years has come in spite of its banking system. A dinner party might speculate where China would be if not for Mao; but a more immediate question is: where would China be if its banking system supported the private sector? “If the economy has grown by 10 per cent for 30 years, as is reported (and I think that the data in China is very frail – it probably hasn’t grown

Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It would appear that it was well worth the wait, as it immediately met with praise, awarded both the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting Award. This success continued when his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was published five years later. In the last six months alone, it has won two awards in America, including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle award, and nominated for a further two here in the UK. His short story collection explores America’s

It’s refreshing to hear an eminent scientist like Professor Steve Jones concede that their discipline has delivered less than it promised, and to hear him voice scepticism about the pace of technological development. Society’s reverence for the digital, the technological or the scientific often reaches unnerving degrees; so it’s instructive to hear someone at the vanguard of progress caution that it is ‘always a big mistake’ for technology to run ahead of human understanding. I’d be interested to know what he thinks should be done about this problem. But, what is it about certain people’s attitude to religious faith? I reproduce Jones’ answer to JP O’Malley’s final question in full:

There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in the book will have been transformed by art, and isn’t something that comes straight from an author’s imagination more autobiographical, more telling, than things that might have happened to them, anyway? But these serious maxims don’t always quell your desire for real-life incident or gossip. Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be, subtitled ‘A novel from life,’ had me googling paintings by Margaux Williamson: Heti’s best friend in real life and a character in her book. How Should A

Chan Koon Chung’s previous novel, The Fat Years, was set in a gently dystopian Beijing of 2013, when a whole month is missing from the Chinese public’s awareness, and everyone is inexplicably happy. Since it first appeared in 2009, the novel has enjoyed cult success in both Chinese and English translation, even becoming, as Julia Lovell notes in her preface, a chic take-home gift from society hostesses in mainland China. It has shades of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, although the setting of The Fat Years may not be as brutal as either of those. Certainly, to read it now is eerie, so much has

When he arrived in London, Burke had a very brief career in law. He soon dedicated his time to critical thinking, writing and politics. Burke published a number of ground breaking books, including: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and Reflections on the Revolution in France. In his new book, Edmund Burke, Jesse Norman dissects Burke’s outstanding intellect, and his career. He then asks how these ideas might be applied to modern politics. Jesse Norman is Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire. In 2012 he was named as the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year. He is a member of the Treasury