Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...

The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. This year they are teaming up with theartsdesk.com – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to add a brand new award to the line-up.The Young Reviewer Award is aimed at bold, thoughtful young writers aged 18-30 who are serious about a career in arts journalism. It will be presented to the author of the best review of any art-form that we Read more ...

Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...

I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the Beatles sang “All You Need is Love”, and all the great transatlantic hits, including of course Scott Mackenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”. Soon would begin my obsession with the 1960s – Joan Baez was the gateway drug, an album from my sister’s collection my route to learning guitar and her voice and music my entree to Bob Dylan and to the folk and folk-rock that enthrals me still and to Read more ...

I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist, drilling their characters like counters on a model battlefield. And impressed that they seem in absolute control of the direction their story is going to take. One novelist friend told me he always has the final line of his book written before he even starts.I am not, alas, that kind of writer. I plot and scheme, of course, but it hardly ever comes out the way I’ve sketched in my head. The late William Trevor said of his writing: “If I didn’t believe it was a mystery, the whole thing Read more ...

Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same city, has it nailed down. It was founded through the mad enthusiasm, intelligence, determination and just off-the-scale energy of Peter the Great in 1703, built on the bodies of around 30,000 labourers (not the 300,000 that later rumours have suggested) at the whim of an Emperor. You can visit his original wooden cabin there today; the nobles he ordered, on pain of forfeiting titles and wealth, to come and live in his new city had to build in stone.It has been at times the capital of Russia. Its Read more ...

It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by an embattled prime minister, bruised by the Maastricht Treaty (remember “the bastards”?). Neil Kinnock had been expected to win, Labour ahead in the polls until the last. Party chairman Patten orchestrated the campaign so perhaps the exigencies of the role left little time to attend to his own constituency. In any event, to those disappointed that the Tory order was not overturned, Patten’s defeat was a cheering moment in a grim night.He felt “sick at the humiliation” but a consolation Read more ...

Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of geology in paving the way to an understanding of the evolution of our planet as a changing physical entity that was to eventually support ever-evolving forms of life: but this is not so much revealtion of a secret, more a history. In a series of short pithy chapters, we are treated to a fascinating cast of characters who invented a new subject, both academic and practical, with enthusiasm and almost overwhelming energy, embracing those on the other side of the Channel Read more ...

As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and reality of the Amazon seems timely. The latest of John Man’s works of popular history is opportunistic enough to end with a fascinating account of the origins of the female world-saviour originally launched by DC Comics in 1941. He relies extensively on – and acknowledges – Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which explains the proto-feminist origins of the female answer to Superman.The invention of Wonder Woman is one of the most recent manifestations of a mythologising thread Read more ...

In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British readers will likely have first encountered him through his Radio 4 series Introducing David Sedaris, and may know the voice, and the author’s ability to extract comedy from the everyday. This collection of diaries gives us the first draft of his experiences, before they are crafted into the exquisitely timed and phrased pieces that made his name.Sedaris is most often encountered today in the rarefied pages of The New Yorker; Read more ...

Imagine that you come across a story by a journalist who, writing for the Daily Mail or The Sun, steals the identity of a real young man from a poor neighbourhood of south-east London. He had died of an overdose, aged 20, in 1984. Not knowing whether this kid’s immediate family still lived, the sleuth hi-jacks the name of an actual individual – just as, notoriously, undercover officers of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad did when they infiltrated protest groups. First, the reporter buttresses this purloined identity with a sheaf of forged documents and an active Read more ...

University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors Read more ...