Books
Recent crime novels
The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…
Seeing Dante anew
Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But, like Dante himself,…
More ugly truths
Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows…
Extreme poetic licence
On Laurie Lee’s centenary, Jeremy Treglown wonders how the writer’s legacy stands up
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
Gossip with a kind heart
J.K. Rowling’s second novel under the Robert Galbraith moniker is a whodunit set in the publishing industry. This isn’t a…
Books and arts
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Labor renewal?
Ben Chifley once spoke about a shining light on the hill. By the time that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard…
Extreme poetic licence
He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider…
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
Extreme poetic licence
He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider…
Spoken For
What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without…
Quiet, calm consideration…
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
Oh, what a tangled web
There aren’t many places you can get shouty about Proust without losing your job. The Lane Bookshop in Perth, Western…
No need for special pleading
To discover an ‘unknown’ is the dream of anyone connected with the arts and in Johannes Thopas (c.1626-1688/95) we have…
Funny, rude and tender
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album,…
Cannon and ball
David Crane on an old soldier’s account of a 200-year-old battle that will never fade away
Talking tough
Last year a Washington-based journalist called Mark Leibovich wrote This Town, a book whose thesis was, roughly, that Washington-based journalists…
Doubly unexpected
Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ —…
Ice Sculpture
If I begged you to, would you hitchhike to the ice-sculpture factory, where the drunken cow was just presented, and…
Teething troubles
Paul O’Rourke, the narrator of Joshua Ferris’s third novel, is a dentist who spends his days staring into the murky…
Barflies and buccaneers
In February 1924 the Hotel Florida, a ten- storey marble-clad building with 200 rooms, a glass-roofed atrium and red plush…
A baking June
If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very…
Amour fou
This novel is based on the life of Charles Baudelaire and the relationship he enjoyed — or endured — with…
All sorts and all sports
Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the…
