The grisly art of Revolutionary France
There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…
A dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara: Actress, by Anne Enright, reviewed
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It…
Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work
‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The…
How Diderot’s pleas to end despotism fell on deaf ears in Russia
Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon…
Who needs a plot? asks Anne Tyler
Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown…
An intense conversation about life, love and writing with Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Le Clézio’s The Prospector: from tropical beaches to the trenches of the Somme
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
A.C. Grayling reduces history to a game of quidditch
The 17th century scores highly — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
Liberty, philosophy and 246 types of cheese
The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity
A sombre Irish family saga — that glows in the dark
The Green Road is a novel in two parts about leaving and returning home. A big house called Ardeevin, walking…
When the money ran out, so did the idealism in post-Revolutionary France
Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr
Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…
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