Fiction
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…
Unconditional love
Halfway through her new novel, Margaret Drabble tells us of Anna, the pure gold baby of the title, ‘There was…
Boundless blessings
Ann Patchett’s novels revel in the tightly constructed ecosystems imagined for their characters: an opera singer besieged among diplomats in…
Homage to Elizabeth the first
‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains…
Thirty years on
Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy,…
The thrill of the chase
Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a…
Paradise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
The imitable Jeeves
For as long as I can remember — I take neither pleasure nor pride in the admission — I have…
Dancing to a different tune
Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money…
Dutch comfort
Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel…
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…
An Affair to remember
The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial…
…and murderous, child-molesting mystics
Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of…
Vichy from the inside
There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le…
No use crying over spilt blood
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the…
Belgian fancy
In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry,…
A world without Wallis
In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now…
