Henry James
A precocious protagonist: Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart, reviewed
No wonder clever ten-year old Vera is suffering intense anxiety in Manhattan, what with problems at school, her birth mother vanishing and the wider American world in turmoil
The pursuit of love letters: My Search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket, reviewed
Our magnificently monstrous anti-hero goes in quest of a cache of reputedly pornographic letters written by the former US president to his mistress
The pen and the plant
A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them
Sinister siblings
A brother and sister are dispatched to a relative’s farm in Colorado, and grow up isolated, unfeeling and even estranged from each other
Doomed youth
Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer…
Effortless superiority
It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White…
That’s no lady
Did I enjoy this novel? Yes! Nevertheless, it dismayed me. How could John Banville, whom I’ve admired so much ever…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
… trailing strands in all directions
Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…
Ivory towers
Great novels rarely make great movies, but for half a century one director has been showing all the others how…
The elegiac and the exuberant
Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a…
Pornographer-in-Chief
What does Andrew Davies have to say to those who accuse him of gratuitous rumpy-pumpy in his adaptations of the classics? Stephen Smith finds out
That Force of Destiny isn’t a great evening is the fault of Verdi not ENO
The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock,…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
The rich are a different species
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
Suffering in style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
The price test
If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a…
How to enrich your life
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
The grace of childhood
What Maisie Knew is an adaptation of the Henry James 1897 novel, updated to Manhattan in the now, and is…
A glass of wine with Dickens
Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The…
