Books
Marina Vaizey
It is not just the season of holidays and holy days in the monotheistic religions; the art galleries and museums are busy reminding us of worlds beyond, with Imagining the Divine at the Ashmolean in Oxford, and Living with Gods at the British Museum (replete as is now de rigueur with illuminating radio programmes from Neil Macgregor, whose book will follow in March). God and gods are more than ever with us, even in the West’s secular age.As if to emphasise that, God: A Human History is an individual and idiosyncratic compendium of authorial and anecdotal observations on gods and God from the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One of these years, Javier Marías will probably win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If and when that honour happens, critics may well discuss the Spanish writer’s fiction, in all its “intensity, complexity and power to convince”, in much the same terms as he applies to one of his favourite works of art. This evergreen marvel is “not just extraordinarily complex as regards narrative and time, it is also chillingly ambiguous; and it does not attempt to explain anything about the grave matters it touches upon: identity, being and not being, the real and the hypothetical, memory as not something Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Tina Brown’s first Christmas issue of Vanity Fair in 1984 had this to say about “the sulky, Elvisy” Donald Trump: “…he’s a brass act. And he owns his own football team. And he thinks he should negotiate arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.”Trump stalks these gripping, funny pages like a virus (and indeed, AIDS is just tightening its grip on New York). In 1990 a damning piece in VF reveals he has a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his office; the last entry of 1991 has him pouring a glass of wine down the writer’s back at a party in revenge and then sneaking away. The diaries – a Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb? Hardly uncontroversial, let alone inoffensive (he suggested Mary Beard should be kept away from TV cameras on account of her looks, and shot a baboon), he was consistently brilliant. Wherever he went, he brought his readers with him. His journalist’s eye and performer’s hunger made him a natural raconteur, one who could induce synaesthesia so you could taste words.People dear to me loved his writing Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Novelist Jonathan Coe has, for some time, been assuming the role of an Evelyn Waugh of the left. Brilliant early comedies about education, journalism, and power have made way for longer, deeper, but arguably somewhat lugubrious, almost mystical investigations into lost, neglected people and places. With The Broken Mirror, Coe revisits many of these themes, but in the form of a tiny, poignant, crystalline fable.One of the most distinctive – and, in my view, valuable – aspects of Coe’s novels has always been a willingness to take on specific, practical political issues. In the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A year ago, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his work commended by the committee "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". The media response was like no other and we admirers felt vindicated. Still it was often necessary to explain why he deserved it and easy to fall back on the evidence of that mighty handful of great 1960s albums, plus Blood On the Tracks, Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind.Professor Christopher Ricks, long-time Dylan advocate whose vast output includes a fat tome on Dylan’s Visions of Sin, was among the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her death by according her an imagined life.Last year Han Kang won the Man Booker International with The Vegetarian, a slim novella about a woman who decides to give up meat — a deeply subversive action practically unheard of in her home country Korea. In her new work The White Book, also translated by Deborah Smith, she transgresses literary Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Oliver Sacks was the neurologist – and historian of science, and naturalist – whose exceptionally elegant, clear and accessible prose has captivated that almost mythical creature, the general audience, through more than a dozen books as well as many essays. Who could resist his narratives of patients who had, to say the least, unusual brains: the subject of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the astonishing musical savants who could communicate only through music in Musicophilia, or Awakenings about brain-damaged people affected by the infamous “sleepy sickness” (encephalitis lethargica Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
At first glance, Susie Boyt’s sixth novel seems in danger of echoing her half-sister Esther Freud’s Lucky Break, another story about actors. But how unfair – of course Love and Fame has its own distinctive, witty brilliance. Eve Swift comes from an acting dynasty but she is a failed thespian after nerves – “She’s as highly strung as a violin factory” – force her to pull out of playing Nina in The Seagull. For four weeks of rehearsals she doesn’t eat, apart from monkey nuts, or sleep. At first the intensity of her performance works – “You do lost so well, Eve” – but then it Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Marcel Proust was a prolific letter-writer. He wrote tens of thousands of them, and at speed, as can be seen from the two facsimiles which are included with the text of Letters to the Lady Upstairs (there are quite a few more in the original French edition).It is no surprise, given the pace at which he wrote, and the quantity produced, that the occasional batch of previously undiscovered letters should turn up. This new translation comprises 26 of them. Proust wrote 23 letters to Marie Williams, a harpist, a woman who was très distinguée, très parfumée, according to Proust’s loyal maid Read more ...
Katherine Waters
La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port Meadow, north of Oxford. Here all kinds drink: scholars, labourers, watermen; gossip and taunts are exchanged over the bar; peacocks stalk the river terrace, haranguing customers to privilege them with snacks.Our hero is Malcolm, son of Mr and Mrs Polstead who run the inn. He helps with the food service, eavesdrops scholarly (and non-scholarly) conversations, and nurses a long-running feud frozen to silence with the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music, a catch-all term about which Peggy Seeger and her creative and life partner Ewan MacColl (they didn’t actually marry until a decade before his death) had strong feelings. Pete Seeger, Peggy’s half-brother and the legendary composer of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, was more tolerant. To him “the folk revival” in its broadest sense owes much, not least because he spent the years of Senator McCarthy’s “red scare” banished from the airwaves and so teaching folk Read more ...