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The preoccupations of a poet
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
A cultivated mystique
It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court…
The war that changed the world
It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…
A family pilgrimage
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
The scramble for affluence
In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited…
The ever-changing scene
It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the…
Mann’s secret desires
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
A brainwave… or not
We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this…
In the heart of the night
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
An odd, unsettled time
The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old…
Eavesdropping on history
The famous photographic portrait by Karsh of Winston Churchill as wartime prime minster personifies heroic defiance and grim determination. His…
Always entertaining
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Life, love and alienation
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
Afghanistan’s lost hope
Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated…
Seeing red
After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two…
Addicted to love
Ruth, the narrator of Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is both the child of a single mother and a single mother…
More than a club
Even against our better judgment we tend to imbue our sporting heroes with characteristics they may not possess. This can…
From Holy Mother to Black Dragon
The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel…
Everyday matters
Many would say the commute was one thing they didn’t miss in lockdown. But when Lauren Elkin was ‘yanked out…
Hope springs eternal
What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question…
Weaving stories
What are myths for? Do they lend meaning and value to this quintessence of dust? Like religion, perhaps they help…
A woman in the shadows
When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her…
His true calling
We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or…
Boys who never grew up
I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is…
Darkness and desolation
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…
