Philip Hensher is professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of 11 novels including A Small Revolution in Germany.
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It
This biography has somewhat more news value than most literary biographies. Its subject worked hard to ensure that. After 1965, J.D. Salinger, having published one novel, a volume of short stories and two pairs of novellas, withdrew permanently from public life. His last publication, a long story entitled ‘Hapworth 16, 1924’, was never printed in
Some novels gaze and report and argue: others just sing. There are some writers who love and respect the visual arts, and want to bring them into prose — Henry James is one. A work freezes into an act of contemplation and description, as in the Bronzino set piece in The Wings of the Dove.
The Man Booker prize has strong years and weak years. There have been ones when the judges have succeeded in identifying what is most interesting in English-language fiction and others when the task has been comprehensively flunked. With Robert Macfarlane as chairman, 2013 promises to be very good; 2011, which was in fact a strong
A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of
Obviously, now that every high street in England looks identical, and everyone under 30 uses exactly the same Australian rising inflection in speech, books of this sort are based on a false and wishful premise. But let us enter into Paul Morley’s game and ask the question he has asked again. What is ‘the north’
Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence
The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were
Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in
Are things getting better? In some ways, undeniably. Progress is not altogether a fiction, or ‘modern myth’ in John Gray’s terminology, if we focus on such ultimately important ideas as medicine or science. Has life progressed since the discovery of antibiotics? Definitely. Would one seriously wish to have lived before the discovery of anaesthesia? Certainly
Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a
What does fashion look like? When intellectual or artistic vogues change, how do we know when they have happened? The most popular men’s trousers in the UK at the moment are probably ones in a sort of indeterminate beige colour, if you go by the number of people wearing them. But I don’t think that’s
The Quest for Corvo started something rather peculiar in biography. A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic — described as ‘an experiment’ — set out the biographer’s search for his subject, and not just the results. This was justified in the case of an elusive and unusual figure like the ‘Baron’ Corvo. Nowadays, many biographies are written like
Krystal had never shot up before … but she knew how to heat the spoon, and about the tiny little ball of cotton wool you used to soak up the dissolved smack, and act as a filter when you were filling the syringe. She knew that the crook of the arm was the best place
Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic. These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics,
The Letters of T.S.Eliot is a project which already seems to belong to another world, of leisure and detailed scholarship. It was conceived of decades ago, and the first volume, under the editorship of Eliot’s widow Valerie, came out in 1988. A second volume, with the support of the excellent John Haffenden, emerged 21 years
After the turn-of the-century memoir Experience, Martin Amis’s career has been widely perceived as somewhat rocky, shading into moments of disaster. If Experience, with its triple narrative of father, teeth and Fred West, was regarded as a compelling and masterly whole, Amis’s subsequent novels and non-fiction have not been as widely admired. Yellow Dog was
From time to time, society rethinks what its institutions mean. Despite what fundamentalists will tell you, this may include — indeed, almost invariably does include — the institution of marriage. Previous rethinks have involved the admissibility of polygamy (mostly in non-Western societies), the marriageable status of the religious, and the precise borders of incest. Some
The subject here is colossal, covering a substantial stretch of the later Roman empire, the last years of the Persian empire, the conversion of the Arabs, the spread of Christianity and what happened to Judaism. The time span runs, effectively, from the death of Jesus to the moment in the eighth century when the Abbasids
Some writers’ lives are estimable, some enviable, some exemplary. And some send a shudder of gratitude down the spine that this life happened to somebody else. It isn’t necessarily about success or acclaim — most rational people would very much prefer to have had Rimbaud’s life rather than Somerset Maugham’s. But sometimes it is. In
