A bad taste in the mouth
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…
The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
The smoking diary of Gregor Hens
The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will…
A crime novel so incompetent it might have been written by a child
First, a quote from the novel under review. The context: it is a flashback scene of the behaviour of a…
What Hanif Kureishi learned from being robbed by his accountant
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs:…
