Dickens
A rollicking satire on the way we live now
Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series…
Rio’s rococo genius
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…
The London ear
It’s easy to tag the city’s terrain by writer. But what, wonders Philip Clark, might a map of its music look like?
A mingling of blood and ink
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Law of the jungle
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
Suffering in silence
A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were…
‘Rather like his own ugly duck’
It has long been my habit, when approaching a new biography, to read the account of the subject’s childhood first,…
How to enrich your life
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
Once upon a time there were…
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
Master of suspense
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
Blindness and madness
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
