Books
Crusading passions
In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare: Monstrous familiar…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
Creature comforts
As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
Ill-met by gaslight
What is it about Victorian murders that so grips us? The enduring fascination of Jack the Ripper caught the imagination…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Finally tired of London
Iain Sinclair is leaving London — like the croakiest of the ravens taking flight from the Tower. It is a…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
The writer behind the brand
Few publishing phenomena in recent years have been as gratifying as Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 masterpiece I Love Dick becoming…
A flawed and dangerous theory
If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing…
The art of the arabesque
The title of this book, By the Pen and What They Write, is a quotation from the Qur’an and comes…
City of dreadful dusk
Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
The last great adventure
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
The fruits of imperialism
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Light at the end
It’s an irony of our secular age that the more we fear death, the more enticing we find it. The…
