Books
When sharing isn’t fair
In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be…
A host of unquiet spirits
As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…
Mr Spock and I
For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’…
A good editor and a good man
Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…
What went wrong
I once asked an American friend to come and talk to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. He…
Three writers
This ‘documentary’ of the lives and careers of Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall presents a detailed account,…
‘Existentialism? I don’t know what it is’
We all carried their philosophy around in our youth, says Philip Hensher. But did anyone — including the existentialists themselves — really understand it?
Waspish traditionalist
Randolph Schwabe (b. 1885) was a measured man in art and in life. His drawings are meticulous, closely observed models…
Ruling the digital waves
Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be…
Vile deeds and voyeurism
The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…
All things to all men
The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has…
Muses, nurses and punch-bags
The conceit of this book — the author’s third on Robert Lowell — is strong, although its execution is less…
In the wrong club
Groucho Marx was delighted when he heard that the script for one of his old Vaudeville routines was being reprinted…
Two men in a boat
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…
An electrifying politician
Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…
Doomed youth
It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars…
Life in a glass house
‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…
The Mann who knew everyone
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
War on Mount Olympus
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
One man’s war through 45 objects
Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties:…
Books and Arts opener
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Hat trick
Kipling once wrote a poem lamenting that the three-volume romantic novel (‘The old three-decker’) was said to be extinct. It…
Viewing the view
It’s not all picnics and cowslips. You need sense as well as sensibility to appreciate a landscape, says Mary Keen
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
In praise of affectation
Jonathan Beckman 20 February 2016 9:00 am
Aversion to pretentiousness was probably an English trait before Dr Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s arguments for the immateriality of…