Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The best short story collections — from childish gabbling to jaded nihilism

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter…

Ticks and crosses

19 September 2015 8:00 am

Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…

The breast test

29 August 2015 9:00 am

New mothers who can’t keep to the breast-feeding orthodoxy face needless misery and shame

Pop psychology

25 July 2015 9:00 am

The secrets of bubble-wrap and other delicious little sensations

Some animals are more equal than others

13 June 2015 9:00 am

Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…

Privet sorrow

23 May 2015 9:00 am

What does your front garden say about you?

The ass saw the angel

4 April 2015 9:00 am

I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of…

Cold heart of the home

28 March 2015 9:00 am

Against sterile modern kitchens

It takes a village (or six)

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Can England’s 10,000 rural churches survive?

Lapsing into a comma

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Modern manners and the fear of the full stop

Peeking into the seraglio

10 January 2015 9:00 am

If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his…

A fair hearing

6 December 2014 9:00 am

A beautiful speaking voice draws attention to the words spoken

The ossuary at Sedlec in Czechoslovakia, where garlands of skulls drape the vault. The chapel is thought to contain the skeletons of up to 70,000 people

Skulls and cross bones

15 November 2014 9:00 am

Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what…

Doubting Thomas

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…

‘The joy just spilled out’

19 July 2014 9:00 am

The vote on women bishops is a triumph for our diplomatic Archbishops

Seeeing the light

17 May 2014 9:00 am

For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the…

More blood and mud

25 January 2014 9:00 am

Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the…

Escape through the locks

17 August 2013 9:00 am

The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none…

Loved and lost

10 August 2013 9:00 am

Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of…