Books
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…
Swine fever
‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch.…
Manning up
Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first…
Making sense of an unjust world
These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the…
The pleasures of reading aloud
‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
A tidal wave of grief
Most victims of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake — which convinced Voltaire there could be no God — perished not in…
The man who disappeared
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…
Change and decay
Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated…
In Woolf’s clothing
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…
The end of brotherly love
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…
A bad taste in the mouth
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…
