Philip Hensher

When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen

The enjoyment you take in this novel will depend on what sort of animal you think the novel is. If you think novels are moral journeys, examinations of the troubles of the world, you will enjoy it as an ingenious example of the ‘alternate world’ fantasy. If you think they are principally aesthetic objects made

One day in July 1945, a public schoolboy with a straw hat on stood with his trunk on Bishop’s Stortford station, and called out ‘My man’ to the porter. ‘No,’ the porter said, ‘that sort of thing is all over now.’ Whether it was or not, the Attlee period, 1945-51, is the most decisive and

The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an

Of course, he never did. Margaret Thatcher had more sense than to enter into any kind of discussion with Arthur Scargill — the horror of the beer-and-sandwiches relations between previous governments and the unions was too great. Before the 1984-5 miners’ strike which dominated and defined Thatcher’s second term in office, just as the Falklands

Listing page content here Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine

Listing page content here Thin scrapings from the bottom of the Orwell archives, this volume; less than ten years after Peter Davison’s 20- volume complete Orwell, he has taken the opportunity to put some subsequent discoveries into print. The on dit is that the publishers of the complete edition declined the opportunity of presenting this

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in

Only a fool would try to explain fashions and tendencies in novel-writing. Everything can change so quickly, and it only takes one really good novel to rescue a genre which we’d all thought consigned to the dustheap. A year ago, I would have laughed drily at the notion that the campus novel still had some

There’s an old definition of a gentleman: that he is someone who is never rude unintentionally. Rudeness, since then, has spread and spread, and 20 times a day we probably ask ourselves the same question which underlies these two books about contemporary manners. Do they mean to do it? Are they just bleeding ignorant, or

This is the sort of book we can expect to see a great deal more of in the future. After Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a study of the way products or ideas move from niche positions to mass markets — economists and journalists have been racking their brains to come up with usefully

When I was a child, I frankly and thoroughly detested Peter Pan in every single one of its manifestations; horrible Christmas stage spectacular, horrible Disney cartoon, horrible, horrible novel. It was a passionate and immediate hatred, shot through with something very like terror. In part, I guess, it was the idea that someone might come

The time is the late 1990s; the setting a boarding school called Hailsham. This being a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy H., who attended the school, is looking back after some years and trying to make sense of her story. The school, it is quickly made clear, is not quite like other schools,

The biographers, like eager heirs round a deathbed, were amassing by Robert Louis Stevenson’s side while he was still breathing. The story, they could tell, was going to be just too good. The age loved a youthful demise, and anyone could see that Stevenson was not going to make old bones. They were quite right,

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most

Very few people have ever dared to publish a book of aphorisms, and certainly hardly anyone in recent memory. The form is so demanding, basically requiring novelty, truth and literary excellence all at the same time, that even to embark on it needs a writer with high and justified confidence in his own abilities. Don