More from Books
Longing to belong
Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road, is a smart and sensitively layered story that’s told through niggling memories, unspoken thoughts,…
Blinded by Bismarck
The reviewer’s first duty is to declare any skin he may have in the game, so here goes: I write…
A river runs through it
‘Without this river the Russians could not live,’ remarked Robert Bremner in his work, Excursions in the Interior of Russia.…
Nature fights back
Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed…
A real wild child
Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the…
The value of suffering
A death sentence, prison in Siberia, and chronic epilepsy. The death of his young children, a gambling addiction, and possible…
Dark and twisted
Patricia Highsmith’s life was filled with more eccentric, disturbing brilliance than most readers can normally handle; and so the chief…
Ancestral voices
Despite innovative work by younger writers, there remains a prominent strain in Irish literature of what we might call the…
Easy pills to swallow
Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…
Flight from reality
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Rag-tag heroes
‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter…
Communicating in code
When Martin Puchner was a child, tramps would turn up at his family home in Nuremberg to be fed by…
When history is bunk
In the 1930s curators at the British Museum, under orders from Lord Duveen, a generous donor, scoured and hacked at…
Raw Bacon
Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max…
Crying for Latin America
It wasn’t so long ago that British readers, on hearing about the incompetence and corruption of Latin America’s political leaders,…
Laurels for Ardi
To comprehend ourselves and the future of humankind we have to understand where we came from. Unlike the approximately 350,000…
Unhealed wounds
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
It’s that man again
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
Grand disillusion
There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can…
Journey to the unknown
Narratives of frozen beards in polar hinterlands never lose their appeal. Most of the good stories have been told, but…
Prize wide open
Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel…
The fog of unknowing
It’s 1981 in Richmond, south-west London. Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is called out to a rundown house where the octogenarian…
Soft-centred satire
There was an acidic bravura and beauty in P.J. O’Rourke’s early journalism and a gleefulness in the ease with which…
Spot the literary character
For answers, visit spectator.com.au/2020/12/answers-to-spot-the-literary-character. Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
His own best creation
Cary Grant was a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him. He was a metaphor, too, for the…
