Proust
‘I secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately’ – Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson’s mesmerising biography of one of the past century’s most singular writers is especially enlightening on the ‘domestic savagery’ often required of a great artist
Reading the classics should be a joy, not a duty
Edwin Frank’s survey of 20th-century fiction stresses the po-faced seriousness of the great novel. But many masterpieces revel in the ridiculous – or are about nothing at all
Remembrance of feasts past
In 1927, A.J. Liebling sailed from America to study medieval literature at the Sorbonne. Instead, he taught himself how to eat French food
The waking nightmare
After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath
All human life is here
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
A fat king with a sex chair
When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the…
Candid camera
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
César Aira returns to the evocative small-town landscape of his youth
The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the…
Muddled in minutiae
‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…
Dark night of the soul
As bombs fall everywhere in Syria and IS fighters destroy Palmyra, a musicologist in Vienna lies awake all night thinking…
A mirror to the world
The best new books celebrating Shakespeare’s centenary are full of enthusiasm and insight — but none plucks out the heart of his mystery, says Daniel Swift
Gay tittle-tattle
The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…
Diary
Disappointingly, the recent film about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, does not include the thing about him which most struck…
Swords of honour
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Translating Proust wasn’t all
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Blue-sky thinking
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
Reading a face
Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A…
