Satire
Torn between envy and contempt
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…
Nothing quite adds up
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
Literary lap dance
Great excitement for play-goers as a rare version of a theological masterpiece arrives in the West End. Doctor Faustus stars…
Laughter and tears
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in…
Osbert Lancaster: a national treasure rediscovered
True to his saw that ours is ‘a land of rugged individualists’, Osbert Lancaster, in his self-appointed role of popular…
Jonathan Coe’s raucous social satire smoulders with anger behind the fun
When Rachel, one of the unreliable narrators of Number 11, wants to ‘go back to the very beginning’, she starts…
Angry, funny, timely
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
Reality games
The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator,…
Sex, violence and lettuces
There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…
Is satire a dying art?
I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is…
Re-election
In a late schedule change, Channel 4’s Coalition was shifted from Thursday to Saturday to make room for Jeremy Paxman…
Spitting Image
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Down and out
The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious…
Struggling to keep up
Paul Fournel is a novelist, former publisher and French cultural attaché in London, and the provisionally definitive secretary and president…
Dishing the dirt
Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long,…
