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Man of vision
‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…
Communing with the dead
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
Nazi on the run
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
A mini art form
It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read…
Under a bad moon
Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…
Foul play in Ferrara
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
The spirit of beauty
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
Feeding the world
The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the…
How far could he go?
I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…
Village villainy
Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like…
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Nasty, brutish and short
As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…
The comfort of strangers
For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes,…
The best of the bunch
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
A sentimental journey
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
Perturbed spirit
Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The…
The French scapegoat
On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…
Adrift in Berlin
Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…
A shaggy drug story
The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…
Seize the moment
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…
Grand tours and package holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Another pink gin please
At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the…
Men under fire
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
The essence of bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
How to build a monastery
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
