Books
What a Day
The blue sky is Sunni. The white clouds are Shia. The sun is happy. The shops are crowded. The planet…
The raw material of fiction
Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine
The sick man of Europe finally succumbs
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
Snow White or black beauty?
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Songs of innocence and experience
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which…
Blitzed on Benzedrine
Lore has it that those viewing naughty books in the British Museum could once do so only with the Archbishop…
Full of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
A break from sabre-thrusting
Allan Mallinson’s historical series concerning Matthew Hervey, the well-bred, thoughtful soldier, details a world where men are practical and not…
Sher force of character
Understandably given its bulk, Antony Sher’s Falstaff in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recent production of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays…
A graceful writer and a graceful man
Tom Stoppard recalls bedsit days in Sixties London with his laconic friend Derek Marlowe, as they both embarked on a life of writing
Books & arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Local hero
Some of us habitually quote Orwell’s correct comparison of producing first-person prose to ‘dosing yourself with some … very deleterious…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
Sum total
Midnight to dawn adding one more to the serial tally, love and irritation carried over, borrowed and paid back, all…
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with
All things to all men
What did St George do? Killed a dragon, as everyone knows. And yet, as Samantha Riches points out, no mention…
A safe pair of hands
Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break…
Gunning for freedom
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
Dirty dealing across the board
I knew there had to be a point to Monopoly. The game itself is tedium made cardboard, the strongest known…
Bitten by the bug
‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at…
A peephole into Peru
Mario Vargas Llosa likes to counterpoint his darker novels with rosier themes: after the savagery of The Green House came…
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have…
Passionate pioneers
If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even…
