At the beginning, it was rather like a bizarre round of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’. Decca ran away to the Spanish civil war; Unity went to Munich and made friends with Hitler; Diana bolted with the founder of English Fascism and then went to prison; Pamela stayed at home; Debo ended up with Chatsworth; and
Quid have we here? Nihil less than a smart parody of all the usual travel guides and one that manages to sustain its originality by delivering genuine, if often larky or unashamedly salacious, information about ancient Rome in a handy modern format. Provincial visitors, lugging their impedimenta up the Appian Way might have found it
Small Room in a Hotel In this cool cube of marble I am valid but invisible As an image caught in a camera But not yet reproduced. My reappearance from confinement Is that of a lavatory Houdini Except that no one notices And the wonder is reduced to a trickle. How many men have died
Michael Ondaatje’s legion of admirers will not expect a novel constructed around a linear narrative, or even cohering in the developing consciousness of a central character. ‘Everything is collage,’ he tells us in Divisadero, a novel which is perhaps over-full of self-referential pointers. The work, we are led to infer, is like a ‘helicoidal’ spiralling
Richard Russo is one of those writers, and they are many — indeed, they are most — whose work you may have read and enjoyed and yet whose name you may not instantly recognise. These are the stalwarts, the broad-shouldered, able-bodied men and women of literature, the workers, who for some reason lack that instant
Perhaps because he talks so much and has been in politics for so long, Roy Hattersley has the happy knack of making you believe that he was there at the events he describes. And if he wasn’t, he most certainly should have been, to the undeniable advantage of all concerned. For instance, the miners should
This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran, E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a
I was once given a poetry lesson by Kingsley Amis during which he said of unintentional rhymes and assonances in blank verse, ‘Never make the reader pause without profit.’ In The Model by Lars Saabye Christensen, the profitless pause count was wearyingly high. On page 3 and 4 the central character, Peter Wihl’s wife, is
Caryl Phillips has found his niche, as a master of historical ‘re-imaginings’. To blend real sources and fictional interpretations into a continuous narrative requires expert control, and he has it. Foreigners tells the heartbreaking stories of three black men struggling, and ultimately failing, to find their footing in England. It follows Dancing in the Dark
Sung Dynasty My lover tells me that when autumn comes He will fashion me a boat of cherry blossom: There’s no way I’m getting in that. Sean O’Brien
Shakespeare may be the man of the previous millennium, but he is doing pretty well in the current one, too. Always at the heart of literary academia (inspiring around 4,000 books, monographs and other published studies each year), he has of late recaptured the general reader, thanks to an annual procession of well-received biographies from
It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything
David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on
The stories of this volume are not so much stories, in the sense of having a plot and characters, but rather homilies, in which the dominant notes are anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and a rather nice line in irony (often directed against Muslim fundamentalists). One of the best is ‘The Suicide of the Astronaut’, in which a
Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. Ten days ago I went to one of London’s finest restaurants, the Lahore in Whitechapel. The place was packed with hundreds of eager punters. There were bankers from the City, large
It used to be the taste of shame. Something that could induce nightmare Proustian flashbacks to teenage years of furtive pub trips and buying jumbo supermarket two-litre bottles. Never go back! And yet we all apparently have: this alcoholic madeleine is cider, and it appears that everyone loves it now, unreservedly, without any embarrassment. But
Was last weekend the most stirringly chock-full and eventful ever in sports broadcasting history? BBC Radio 5 heroically, breathlessly, covered the lot. Television viewers possessing the full works — satellite, terrestrial and all the trimmings — must have been frenziedly fingering their remote dibber like demented teenage girls texting myriad mates on their mobiles. For
Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly
Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right! Monday Great to be back from hols to find
‘Hello, Gavin. Have you got the sackbuts with you?’ Administrative magician Rebecca Rickard is dealing with what is, for her, a fairly ordinary sort of phone call in the greater scheme of things. As it turns out, Gavin (Henderson) has indeed got no fewer than three sackbuts, and is planning to bring them with him
