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The time of our lives
The long 1990s began with the Pixies album Surfer Rosa in 1989 and ended with the invasion of Iraq in…
A game of life and death
No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant…
The past is ever present
‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins TheLong Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if…
Time to sit and stare
In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche made a complaint about the modern world, writing in The Gay Science: Even now one is…
The beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
And on it goes
A question looms throughout this book: is it better to die rather than experience the wrath of a publicly shamed…
Once upon a time in the South
To write a first novel of 800 pages is either supremely confident or crazy. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of…
The great divide
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
Mirror of distortion
Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the…
Autocrat and autodidact
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Sly and saucy
At last, and finally: literary sex is back. The Bad Sex Prize has a lot to answer for in British…
Hopes and fears
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
Senses sent awry
Jesus is a Malteser. You might say I’m a liar or accuse me of the most egregious heresy, but the…
Where life is evil now
The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…
True grit
In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales…
Smoking muskets and flashing daggers
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
Gardening for pleasure and instruction
On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some…
The trouble with Auntie
An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely…
Change or decay
Climate change may be the central challenge of our century, but almost all attention has focused on its consequences for…
The least Soviet-friendly artist imaginable
The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what…
We were warned
Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in…
Shades of the prison house
For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary…
GHB and GBH
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…
What the Georgians did for us
‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when…
Looking on the bright side
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a…
