book reviews and features

Richard Adams: 'If I'd known how well I could write I’d have started earlier'

Jasper Rees Wednesday, 28 December 2016

Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he...

Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to Hollywood

David Nice Saturday, 24 December 2016

Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic...

Sunday Book: Treasure Palaces - Great Writers Visit Great Museums

Florence Hallett Sunday, 18 December 2016

The modern experience of visiting museums is so far from the hushed contemplation envisaged by our Victorian forebears that the very idea is sufficient to induce a rosy glow of nostalgia, as...

Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Markie Robson-Scott Sunday, 11 December 2016

When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’...

Shirley Jackson: A Rising Star at 100

Laurence Jackso Tuesday, 06 December 2016

My mother has been rediscovered, if she ever went away. She is suddenly a rising star, 51 years after her early death. Interest in Shirley Jackson’s novels and stories has blossomed significantly...

Sunday Book: Günter Grass - Of All That Ends

Boyd Tonkin Sunday, 04 December 2016

In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As...

Carols From King's: How a tradition was made

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 27 November 2016

For the first decade of its life, King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols remained a local phenomenon, a “gift to the City of Cambridge”. But that all changed in 1928 with the first BBC...

Sunday Book: Lynne Truss - The Lunar Cats

Matthew Wright Sunday, 27 November 2016

Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers,...

Sunday Book: The New Yorker Book of the 60s

Liz Thomson Sunday, 20 November 2016

As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a...

Sunday Book: Zadie Smith - Swing Time

Boyd Tonkin Sunday, 13 November 2016

In his lovely memoir My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn dubs the Holloway and Caledonian Roads the “Tigris and Euphrates” of his family history. In that case, just a few pages west...

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