Books
Hugh Barnes
Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. “It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system.”William Boyd’s latest excursion into fictional biography, aptly entitled The Romantic, is the fourth of the “whole-life” novels he has made his speciality, following The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015). It will almost certainly do, as far Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The title of Andrew Murray’s new book poses a question that also vexed Friedrich Engels over 130 years ago. The German co-author of The Communist Manifesto despaired of English socialism, "that abomination of abominations", on the grounds that it had "not only become respectable but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.”The treacherous lure of the Establishment has indeed been a constant problem for Labour leaders from Ramsay MacDonald and Hugh Gaitskell to Sir Keir Starmer. Roy Jenkins, who narrowly failed to get the top job, was Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Liminal: a word that conjures thresholds and between states. Caught between three languages – the adjective is a borrowing from the Latin that enters English by way of German – liminal also has three distinct definitions.There is the underused sense: to produce “minimal” effect or when “a sensation becomes too faint to be experienced”. The more ubiquitous definition: being “transitional or intermediate between two states, situations”, or “characterised by being on a boundary or threshold”. Lastly, there is liminal’s cultural anthropological meaning, as when a person is between two “culturally Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Book of Goose, Yiyun Li’s fifth novel, is the gripping story of two teenage French girls and their intense, uneven friendship.On the surface, at least, it’s more accessible and light-hearted than some of her fiction, such as The Vagrants, an account of life in totalitarian China, where Li was brought up (she moved to the USA in 1996 and is now a professor of creative writing at Princeton) or Where Reasons End, (2019) a hauntingly beautiful dialogue between a mother and her dead 16-year-old son.This, tragically, mirrors Yi’s life: that book is dedicated to her own teenage son, Vincent, who Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country claimed 33 lives (and a further 400 from smoke inhalation); devastated 186,000 km of land; destroyed 3,500 homes; displaced 65,000 Australians; and killed or displaced near on three billion animals.When most of the world entered lockdown in March 2020, barely a month had passed since the final flames of the Black Summer were extinguished: I remember thinking, if we think we’ve got it bad, what about Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was not until October 2017 that The New York Times ran a front page story by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey with the title “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harrassment Accusers for Decades.”A few days later, the board of the Weinstein Company, including the crucial vote of his younger brother Bob, ejected him. And from then on, the prosecution started to put together the case against Weinstein, which, after over a hundred women had testified against him, resulted in his conviction and imprisonment in February 2020.But could the tide have turned against him many years earlier? Why didn’t it Read more ...
India Lewis
Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele fled to South America and the book’s subject is the permanent holiday of the so-called “Angel of Death” – a poisoned chalice of a life in unending, hidden exile.Recently translated into English by Georgia de Chamberet, Guez’s book won the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. It is, ostensibly, a Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
Sitting in the park on a hot summer’s day, life began to imitate art. I had been soaking up the sun’s now overpowering rays for over an hour and was beginning to feel its radiating effects.Golden green filaments of grass moved back, the trees swayed in heady sympathetic succession; buzzing from the outside in, my body started to metabolise light at a speed my brain couldn’t fathom. My skin bubbled green, my tongue unfurled petals and my eyes sprouted luminous buds. I had become a plant – or so I felt – and the sun-soaked synthesis of my transformation was near complete.Hyperbole, you wonder? Read more ...
Harriet Mercer
The word “shrine” somersaults me back to the path of the Camino de Santiago. I have lost count of the faces that smiled up from photos positioned in the hollow of trees, some with little plastic figurines for company, others set in stone next to a sculptural pile of pebbles. Some of the shrines also sheltered a handwritten prayer or a crucifix; most had burnt-out tea-candles.Phoebe Powers imagined her debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria, “as a shrine: a gathering of objects, words and images important to someone, both as discrete objects and as a composition”. Her second poetry Read more ...
India Lewis
A sequel is always a hard thing to write, especially if the book that precedes it is a bestseller, adapted for television and read by more than a million people. Yet Jessie Burton’s The House of Fortune, following as it does on the gilded heels of The Miniaturist (2014), deals with its antecedent with grace, allowing for its larger shade.Picking up the story eighteen years after The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune returns to the beautiful house on the Herengracht, in Amsterdam, where we left it. Its original owners are dead, one of them executed for the crime of sodomy, the other dead in Read more ...
India Lewis
The title of Katya Adaui’s debut collection in English is taken from one of the 12 short stories it contains: an allusion to the depths hidden below the surface, which is also one of the book’s central motifs.Adaui is the Peruvian author of three books of short stories and a novel, who now lives in Buenos Aires. Here Be Icebergs, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is an elegant, slim volume, which, despite its size, manages to capture the enormity and complexity of familial and personal ties.The opener, “The Hunger Angel”, is an excellent depiction of how we can merge into our family whilst Read more ...