Tedious, lazy and pretentious – Irvine Welsh’s Men in Love is a disgrace
Clumsy, self-regarding sequels to Trainspotting simply won’t work any more
Memoirs without memory
James Kelman doubtless remains best known for his 1994 Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late and…
Small is beautiful
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Not a party person
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…
Asia’s ancient feuds
The mutual animosity of the Far East Asian nations can strike some as baffling, given their shared history and cultures,…
The Adulterants: a caustic take on London’s brutal property market
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The…
The keys to Chinese
The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…
