More from Books
The truth is difficult
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…
A river runs through it
As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead,…
The house on the Heath
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Gimme shelter
In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…
Tears before bedtime
I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward…
Grim and resolute
Faber must take a rather dim view of British readers’ historical awareness these days. This is a biography of one…
Holiday washout
There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of…
Playing by his own rules
There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in…
What really happened?
This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…
We want lies
On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a…
An ode to brotherhood
The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the…
He shall not grow old
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
Rival magicians
Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages…
The knights’ tale
One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to…
A colourful pot-pourri
For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The…
The dear departed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
Scholar and wandering poet
Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…
A fog of forgetfulness
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
The scourge of mankind
In supposedly unprecedented times such as ours, there are compelling reasons to turn to the history of medicine. For hope,…
A tide of distrust
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
A radical rite
The history of rubbish can be scholarship, but the history of scholarship is often rubbish. Hindsight diminishes earlier habits of…
Tantrums of a tyrant
It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would…
The gay carousel
John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…
Small is beautiful
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Madcap escapades
The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains,…
