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The tarnished city on the hill
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Not long for this Erth
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Real life breaks in
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and…
Rocks of ages
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
When poison is the cure
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was…
Diabolical twists
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
The great carve-up
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…
Yummy mummy
Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from…
The curse of Cain
When police were called to a block of flats in north London at the beginning of 2002, they expected to…
Missing the big picture
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
Hard times for the arts
As readers of a certain age will realise, Looking for a New England derives its title from ‘A New England’,…
No room at the top
‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to…
Apocalypse then
Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for…
No regrets
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…
Anonymous alcoholics
Mick Herron has been called ‘the John le Carré of his generation’ by the crime writer Val McDermid, and in…
The monk’s tale
In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what…
Rich man, bankrupt, thief
‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s…
Misery handed on
What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces…
Unlived lives
Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in…
It wasn’t rocket science Jay Elwes
In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a…
The triggers of memory
Can you remember when you heard about 9/11? Chances are you’ll be flooded instantly with memories — not only where…
In no woman’s land
As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman,…
Cold and inhospitable
Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing…
A bundle of woe
It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have…
Looking back at Brexit
Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good,…
