Honor Clerk 
The picture of health
It must have been hard to settle on a title for this book; but then this is not the book that Richard Cork originally had in mind. In his introduction… Read more
Ransacking the world
Something in the air is arousing an interest in collectors and collections — both private and public — of which the success of The Hare with Amber Eyes and The… Read more
Walking wounded
Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen… Read more
The devil’s in the detail
The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Standing behind the high altar in Prato Cathedral last week, binoculars trained on a fresco some 40 feet above, I found myself puzzling… Read more
Morality tale with a difference
A Most Wanted Man, by John le Carré Location, location, location is as much the mantra of espionage fiction as it is of another profession’s literature celebrated for making things… Read more
The circle of a lonely psychiatrist
Honor Clerk on Siri Hustvedt’s latest novel Born into a second generation Norwegian immigrant family, Erik Davidsen is a divorced New York psychoanalyst with his fair share of sorrows and… Read more
A new way of seeing
In one of his more endearing flights of fancy, Eddie Izzard once speculated on what the Greeks did with themselves in the Wooden Horse while waiting for nightfall in Troy.… Read more
The school of hard knocks
The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler,… Read more
An ever-present absence
It is a curious phenomenon of the modern novel that so many writers entrust their narrative voice to a character that in real life they would go a long way… Read more
A martyr without a cause
‘Yes, you may well sigh and beat your head on the table,’ the narrator-protagonist of Love Songs and Lies addresses the reader on page 115, but if you’re going to… Read more
A picture that tells a story
Can it be said that anyone is sane, that anyone is healthy – or does all life consist of degrees of illness and madness? Is love a kind of madness?… Read more
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