Books
A bittersweet tale
Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely…
Dracula was only the start
The title of the journalist Paul Kenyon’s second book on crazy leadership, Children of the Night, leaves the reader in…
Dead gain
Musicians cast a long cultural shadow. Politicians may wield considerable power in their time, but although today’s young people are…
Angry about everything
Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was…
A fevered mind
Philip Hensher finds Robert Burton’s perception of the world and the human condition endlessly fascinating
The AI future is rosy
In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women…
A boon for classicists
The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and…
The ghost in the corner of the room
Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric…
Eye-popping misogyny
There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well…
A true bohemian
It is well established that artists are not always the nicest people. On the surface, the life of the model,…
Basic instincts
What does it mean to be a body in this world? It’s the question animating Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals. Our…
The catastrophe unfolds
The most alarming aspect of living in America is the recurring sensation that no one is in charge. This is…
Language explodes
‘How good you are in explosition!’ The first ever unabridged recording of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a monumental achievement…
An unlikely tragic hero
In this Age of Trump, as we cast about for some moment in American history that might help us make…
The flirt at the funeral
Here is a rare dud from the usually reliable Deborah Moggach. Her protagonist, Pru, finds herself alone at 69 after…
Last rites and wrongs
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…
A pretty kettle of fish
The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across…
Still the Fab Five
In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously,…
The man who wasn’t there
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
Footprints in the mud
During the first lockdown last year, taking my lockdown puppy for our Boris-sanctioned daily walks, I discovered a love of…
The book as narrator
It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages…
An open or shut case?
Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe…
The chaser and the chaste
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…
A death foretold
In March 2014 Gabriel García Márquez went down with a cold. The man who wrote beautifully about ageing was approaching…
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
