Books
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,…
Whatever next?
‘Ah, Jeremy,’ remarked Tony Blair at a smart dinner party in Islington not long before he became prime minister, ‘he…
Beautiful losers
When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short…
One fine spring day
The opening of Graham Swift’s new novel clearly signals his intent. ‘Once upon a time’ tells us that this will…
Putting Germany together again
The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities…
A love letter to Italy
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Escaping the Inferno
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
Burrowed wisdom
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
A box of delights
Juliet Nicolson examines women’s lives and changing fashions through a rich hoard of buttons for all occasions
Raptor rapture
The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for…
Voices of St Joan
I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo,…
A plague on all P-words
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
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…