Fiction
Looking back, losing bits
As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
The violence of poverty
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…
Bohemian life Down Under
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Ye who now will bless the poor Shall yourselves find blessing
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes…
Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil
After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering…
Umberto Eco really tries our patience
Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary…
Man of many worlds
Cult novelist Michael Moorcock on fantasy, his father, and the London he loved and lost
Brought to book
Suite Française is being billed as a second world war romance about ‘forbidden love’ and, in this regard, it is…
Diary
Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I…
A sad tale to tell
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…
Too cute
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…
See how clever
Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress,…
Anachronisms
I read C.J. Sansom’s novel Dissolution on the train recently with pleasure. For an historical novel narrated in the 1530s,…
The freedom of the heat
Those of us who have been struggling to endure the recent heat should turn to L.P. Hartley’s classic coming-of-age novel The…
Another secret garden
Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955, focuses on the roaming children — the ‘sparrows’ — of a shabby street in bomb-torn London. When ten-year-old Lovejoy Mason finds a packet of cornflower seeds and decides to create an ‘Italian’ garden hidden in a rubble-strewn churchyard, the consequences are life-changing for all who become involved. Below is the foreword to a recent reissue of the novel (Virago Modern Classics, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.49).
An uncompromising truth-teller
Paul Binding reassesses the novels of Francis King, who died last year
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
More blood and mud
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the…
By the book – The perils of snooping
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Tortured genius
Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a…
Reds under the beds
Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in…
