Books
Marina Vaizey
An Irishman who spent more than half a century in London and then Devon, and a prolific writer – nearly 20 novels and novellas, some 20 collections of short stories in varying combinations – William Trevor (1928-2016) is often eulogised as a modern Chekhov. He is invariably characterised as the master of the short story in post-Joycean times, rightly revered, esteemed, admired, awarded. Several of these last 10 stories were published in The New Yorker, where much of his finest work in this form has appeared, while several iterations of his Collected Stories published previously have run to Read more ...
Liz Thomson
To readers of newspapers and magazines, the name Clancy Sigal will be very familiar, probably as a film reviewer. Addicted to writing, and to his old Smith Corona #3 portable typewriter, “Hemingway’s preferred machine”, he was a version of the man who came to dinner. He arrived – inevitably, for this was the early 1950s – off the boat in Dover, intending to spend a weekend exploring before returning to the US. He stayed 30 years.“Kicked out of Paris by the French police for having a cancelled US passport and no visa” – years later, he would discover the FBI had branded him SUBVERSIVE – he Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mario Vargas Llosa has written a thriller which opens eye-poppingly. Two wives, one staying over with the other, discover in the course of the night that they are in fact bisexual. “Chabela stayed and slept in the bed with Marisa,” it says towards the bottom of page one, “and now Marisa felt the sole of her friend’s foot on her right instep.” One thing leads to another and for the duration of the novel, set in Lima, the two best friends, whose husbands are also best friends, nip off to Miami or the sauna to pleasure each other in quite some detail. The author has plunged his readers into the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Anecdotal story-telling wrapped up in hypnotic prose, Christie Watson’s narrative is a gentle, emotive five-part layered package of reflection and indignation. It is part memoir-autobiography, part history of nursing (Indian, Greek, Byzantine and African from millennia ago, not to mention Florence Nightingale and her revelatory common sense), and underlying all a polemic in persuasive praise of its crucial importance. There is also rage at what is happening to the NHS today, politically, socially and economically, and what it shows about the state of Britain.We are whisked through the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
To suggest an absence is to imply a presence. Philosophers, novelists, dictators, politicians – as well as almost every “ism” you can think of – take the stage in this absorbing, precisely and elegantly written study of various kinds of atheism. All assumptions are up for grabs, everything brought out into the light and questioned.It is a dizzying read, reminding us, among many other things, how the Enlightenment invented racism and provided justifications for colonial empires; that the deaths of ordinary people in the French Revolution were estimated in the hundreds of thousands; and how Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Wham bam, thank you, ma’am” might be one response to this polemical, wry, hilarious and affecting series of counterintuitive essays by one of the most original and unexpected thinkers around. Barbara Ehrenreich has described herself as a “myth-buster”, and her many books have challenged in an eminently readable fashion all kinds of assumptions that we automatically take for granted and never query, which may easily not only distort our attitudes but actually damage our behaviour. As this book’s subtitle, “Life, Death and the Illusion of Control” suggests, her subjects here are of the utmost Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Inevitably, the story begins and (almost) ends with Las Meninas. Inspired by the art and life of Diego Velázquez, Amy Sackville tops and tails her third novel with his endlessly enigmatic group portrait from 1656. It shows the Spanish royal household, their dwarves, a mastiff, a perplexing reflection of the King and Queen in a mirror – and the court painter himself, trapped forever in this nest of “sometimes impossible frames”. The painting ensnares us in a hall of mirrors, a labyrinth of gazes. Like a half-opened door into the mysteries of perception, Las Meninas has invited a host of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red Lion Square and Grosvenor Square, where Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were the leading lights, demonstrating against Vietnam; Paris, where student protests, strikes and sit-ins quickly spread across the country, and General de Gaulle fled briefly to Germany; the riots across the United States that followed Martin Luther King's death, and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; and of course the Prague Spring, so brutally snuffed out by Soviet tanks. I was a student in the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
When it came out in 1993, Trainspotting was probably the most shocking novel since Lady Chatterley's Lover. It’s rumoured to have missed out on a Booker shortlisting because it offended the judges. Certainly, for your reviewer, a Surrey teenager at the time, its savage crackling humour and eye-popping junkie melodrama was the stuff of gleeful fantasy, especially when canonical comic fiction generally meant Jane Austen. However, a quarter-century on, Dead Men’s Trousers is the sixth novel to tell the story of (some of) the principal Trainspotting quartet of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud Read more ...
Michael Arditti
From the myths of the Old Testament to the miracles of the New, the Bible has been as much a source of inspiration to writers, artists and composers as it has to theologians and priests. One of the most infamous yet influential of all Old Testament myths is that of the Destruction of Sodom, which has inspired writers from the Earl of Rochester to Proust, painters from Dürer to Turner, and film-makers from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Robert Aldrich.It has also been a source of untold misery as the justification for homophobia in Judaism and Christianity and, through its retelling in the Qur’an, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For as long as I can remember, and long before I set foot in America for the first time at age 24, I have been intrigued by America – the “idea” of it, conjured up through music, and, as it turned out, the reality – and the common language which (depending on your point of view) binds us, or separates us. I’ve spent time in 10 of its major cities and, over the last three years, a great deal of time in New York where my (crazy to many British friends) proposal for an arts festival was welcomed, as was I – and by officials whose London equivalents would probably not have granted me the time of Read more ...