Essays
Don’t ask a historian what history is
E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to…
Lucy Ellmann is angry about everything, especially men
Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was…
The AI future looks positively rosy
In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women…
As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?
What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…
Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective
The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding…
Salman Rushdie’s self-importance is entirely forgivable
I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…
Despotic laws can — even should — be ignored, says Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
Joan Didion’s needle-sharp eye never fails
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
Claire Messud helps us see the familiar with new eyes
The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque,…
Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science
One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all,…
Helen Macdonald could charm the birds out of the trees
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
The pleasures — and trials — of knowing Bruce Wannell
Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…
Lydia Davis, like an inspirational teacher, tempts her readers into more reading
A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement.…
Could Leslie Jamison please stop sitting on the fence?
Leslie Jamison is creating quite a stir in America. Her first collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, went straight to…
Vladimir Nabokov confesses to butterflies in the stomach
Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter,…
It’s a dull world in which children don’t challenge their parents
On the Shoulders of Giants consists of 12 essays that the late Umberto Eco gave as lectures at the annual…
Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility
There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when…
Has Shakespeare become the mascot of Brexit Britain?
The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation,…
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be profiled by Janet Malcolm?
God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews…
Does an autobiographical novel really count as fiction?
Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
Making sense of an unjust world
These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the…
Oxford is full of overindulged whiners. It wasn’t like that in my day
I was in the attic killing some Taleban on Medal of Honor when Girl interrupted and said: ‘Dad, what’s this?’…
Helen Vendler is full of condescending waffle (and not just when she’s attacking me)
Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there…
Pricking the pomp of American society
It doesn’t mean much to say that Renata Adler’s journalism isn’t as interesting as her novels — almost nothing is…
