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Rival magicians
Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages…
The knights’ tale
One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to…
A colourful pot-pourri
For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The…
The dear departed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
Scholar and wandering poet
Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…
A fog of forgetfulness
Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…
The scourge of mankind
In supposedly unprecedented times such as ours, there are compelling reasons to turn to the history of medicine. For hope,…
A tide of distrust
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
A radical rite
The history of rubbish can be scholarship, but the history of scholarship is often rubbish. Hindsight diminishes earlier habits of…
Tantrums of a tyrant
It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would…
The gay carousel
John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…
Small is beautiful
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Madcap escapades
The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains,…
Return of the patriarch
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only…
Putting the boot in
Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country…
The past is a foreign country
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who…
The scrapheap of life
All it takes to turn a cast-off into a prized possession can be a bit of imagination. To a passerby,…
The hurricane from hell
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…
Killing time
Keith Douglas is perhaps the best-known overlooked poet. He died following the D-Day landings in 1944, and his Collected Poems…
Back to basics
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all…
Rare beauty
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
Thrills and spills
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to…
Juggling a hot potato
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
No love lost
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir…
How do they do it?
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On…
