Books
God’s children
Once upon a time, Christianity in Australia was seen as the One True Faith. These days, it is likely to…
A gift from beyond the grave
Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI
Too high, too fast
You have to get nearly halfway through this book before it starts to show some life. Until that point, as…
One of history’s saddest chapters
One afternoon in the early 1990s, an elderly gentleman from Alicante told me of the tragedy that had occurred at…
Mother courage
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it…
Everything in black and white
This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on…
Pox-ridden and power-crazed
Poor old Henry IV: labelled (probably unfairly) as a leper, but accurately as a usurper, he has been one of…
A sex vampire on wheels
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Bribes, bickering and backhanders
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…
Among the snobs, slobs and scolds
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and…
Fighting for progress
The 17th century scores highly — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr
Wonderful waffle
It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or…
A choice of first novels
At the beginning of this year I underwent a complete literary detox: an absolute, cold-turkey abstention from cutting-edge fiction of…
Wild man of the woods
The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted…
Foreign body count
China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author…
The ultimate nightmare
On an April morning in 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine High School in Colorado…
A leap in the dark
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
Rich and fruity
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
Fifty shades of blue
Like a lot of people, Olivia Laing came to New York to join a lover. Like a lot of people,…
Finders keepers
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
A topsy-turvy world
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
Away with the fairies
As an erstwhile obituarist, I pity the poor hack who had to write up the life of Laurence Oliphant —…
An innocent abroad
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
About a boy
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From…
A devilish instrument of war
‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to…
