Cressida Connolly is the author of Bad Relations.
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
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
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has a lot to answer for. In the months after its publication, it became the printed equivalent of holy communion: wheresoever two or three people gathered together to break bread, it was earnestly discussed. Shriver’s novel explored the possibility that a child could be born wicked; further,
In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted at any moment. He had one of the nicest voices I’ve ever heard, a voice which might have been made for poetry: impossible to imagine
It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back.
Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example,
The lovely title of this book comes from the philosopher David Hume. The question he posed was this: if a man grew up familiar with every shade of blue but one, would he be able to recognise the hue in a chart of blues, or would it register only as a blank? In other words,
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her books have a knack of chiming with current social concerns, of examining how the family is adapting to changing social mores. She is deservedly a
The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is a question: can a man and a woman ever be true friends, or must sex always get in the way? Jack Holmes and His Friend
Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with one in four adults now clinically obese. A friend who works in orthopaedic surgery tells me that at least 80 per cent of knee replacements are, effectively, self-induced: caused by patients being overweight. Same with hips. Another friend, a consultant, had a complaint lodged against him
Nicola Shulman’s study of Sir Thomas Wyatt and his times, Graven With Diamonds, is both sparkling and scholarly. Nothing I’ve ever read about the court of Henry VIII has made it so vivid. For the first time one could really grasp Anne Boleyn’s wit and intelligence, both of which she must have needed, to keep
In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little essays that give the reader the gist of each place: if there’s a better book to give for Christmas published this autumn, I’d like to
She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt — though she did, I think, sometimes choose frightful people to munch up. . . She was less bitchy than extremely shrewd and sharp-eyed, and didn’t hesitate to say about people exactly what she felt
If you were stranded on a desert island, Ruth Leon would be the perfect companion. She is plucky, resourceful, funny, bright and indomitable: you can see just why the late theatre critic Sheridan Morley fell in love with her. And indeed he did find himself alone with her, on the mental-health equivalent of a desert island,
Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford she had an affair with Martin Amis and travelled to Italy with him, a trip fictionalised in his recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (conveniently out
There are among us a churlish few who consider the term ‘sports personality’ to be an oxymoron. There are among us a churlish few who consider the term ‘sports personality’ to be an oxymoron. John Foot’s sparkling study of Italian cycling is a welcome corrective, alive with terrific characters: Toti, a heroic one-legged cyclist who
Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent who has reported from war zones in Beirut, Iraq and Afghanistan. While he is covering the fall of the Taliban from Kabul in 2002, his talented, bright and amusing elder son Henry is a first-year art student at Brighton. Who is in more danger? The sad answer is Henry.
‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”’ Such is the lifelong aspiration of Stephen Newman, the baby boomer hero of Linda Grant’s new novel. ‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was
Writing an autobiographical account of middle age is a brave undertaking, necessitating a great deal of self-scrutiny at a time of life when most of us would sooner look the other way and hope for the best. Jane Shilling took up riding relatively late (she even joined a hunt, as described in her book The
