An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man
Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the
Supposedly narrated by the scholar and Aristotelian Michael Scott to his pupil the future Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, sometime in the early 13th century, Charlemagne and Roland completes the trilogy begun by The Evening of the World and Arthur the King. Although framed as a picturesquely tongue-in-cheek accompaniment to a great deal of Carolingian
Aldous Jones, the hero of Gerard Woodward’s heroically odd third novel, has sunk into a decline. His wife dead, his only solace the bottle, the retired art teacher sits in the family house in north London brooding over relics of his married life and watching outgrowths of potato tuber lavishly uncoil from one of the
Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back
The most affecting moment in Gordon Burn’s new book is only marginally connected to its subjects. Borrowed from Jackie Milburn’s autobiography Golden Goals, it takes in a long-ago Christmas morning when the future England centre-forward woke in the small hours to discover a new pair of football boots — the first ever allowed him —
As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly
Not long ago I listened to a Radio Two interviewer interrogating Kate Bush about her new album. The particular track that had excited his interest was ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, a puzzling little number about a woman who sits watching the clothes fly by in her washing machine. What was it all about?, he wondered. Ms Bush,
Listing page content here Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s first novel, sold a great many copies and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was also criticised by those guardians of the public conscience who write letters to newspapers on the grounds of cultural tourism. Despite her impeccable Bangladeshi origins, these detractors alleged, the Oxford-educated
Listing page content here The funniest episode in Leo McKinstry’s biography of Sir Alf Ramsey (1920-99) finds its subject — the time is 1973 — reaching the end of his tether with the talented but undisciplined Manchester City forward Rodney Marsh. ‘I’ve told you that when you play for England you have to work harder’,
The people in Rose Tremain’s brisk short stories tend to be hooked on highly symbolic artefacts. Thus the East German border guard of ‘The Beauty of the Dawn Shift’, cycling off to illusory salvation in Russia, takes with him a solitary lemon, ‘a precious possession’ turned up in an otherwise fruit-free grocery store. A middle-aged
One of the more amusing characteristics of the English upper classes is their habit of going around disclaiming their upper-classness. Just as Anthony Powell, a lieutenant-colonel’s son educated at Eton and Balliol and married to an earl’s daughter, used quite seriously to maintain that he was ‘a poor boy made good’, so Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, an
A century ago, Paradise might have appeared in the stout bindings of the Religious Tract Society and been distributed to the deserving young in the form of Sunday school prizes. Or perhaps not, given that it begins in the dining-room of an alien hotel where its heroine, all memory of her previous life temporarily erased,
I will cheerfully own to having struggled in the past with Ronald Frame’s novels. Brooding once over a stack of photographs brought back from a fortnight’s holiday in Kerry, I realised that lurking among the margins of practically every snap — here flung down on a bathing-towel, there wedged beneath the picnic basket — was