Justin Cartwright 
The tragedy of a hamlet
Jim Crace’s novels have one thing in common, which is that each is set in an entirely original world. None of these worlds is of a specific time or place,… Read more
Welcome to surreal Luton
Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or… Read more
Putting the fun in fundamentalism
Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the… Read more
Road to ruins
This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism. Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that… Read more
Mumbai and Mammon
This is a state of the nation novel or more accurately a state of Mumbai novel. Behind the tale of a struggle by a developer to acquire, for flashy redevelopment, … Read more
When the best defence is no defence
This remarkable book is the account by their lawyer of the trial, imprisonment and sentencing to death in the late Eighties of a group of young men who came to… Read more
Positively Kafkaesque
This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of Nadine Gordimer’s non-fiction, called Telling Times. This is a companion to a collection published earlier this year of… Read more
Taking on the turmoil
Nadine Gordimer is now in her mid-eighties. For as long as I have been alive, she has been the towering figure of South African literature, a fact recognised in l991… Read more
A canker on the rose
This is a very short book with large type. DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years Saul Bellow… Read more
Decline in New York
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope. Homer was thought to be blind — if indeed he was one person — and Milton of course suffered torture… Read more
The man who saved Oxford University
The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford is an astonishing building, designed by Christopher Wren. Its painted ceiling has just been restored, so that the darkish miasma that was Robert Streeter’s original… Read more
To be mortal
I have read two outstanding books this summer. This is one of them; the other is Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (reviewed on page 42). As I read The Infinities, with… Read more
Zuluboy is here
South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since Apartheid, by R. W. Johnson After the Party: Corruption and the ANC, by Andrew Feinstein I am writing this in Cape… Read more
My memories of the American Dostoevsky
Justin Cartwright recalls his conversations over the years with John Updike, who died this week, and the master’s contention that the only excuse for reading is to steal I love… Read more
Christmas Short Story
When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas by Justin Cartwright In 1920, at the age of 38, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his father, Hermann,… Read more
The coven reconvenes
The Widows of Eastwick, by John Updike The Witches of Eastwick was published in 1984; it was a retrospective cele- bration of the new sexual liberties and powers available to… Read more
Who is selling what to whom?
Powers of Persuasion: The Story of British Advertising by Winston Fletcher The impression you get from reading this book, which covers post-war advertising until the present, is of a chaotic,… Read more
Mad, bad and incompetent
As we now know, the unimaginably awful Third Reich did not spring fully formed from Hitler’s mind. Its antecedents can be traced to the predominantly upper-class and reactionary parties of… Read more
Daring to defy the myth
Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures.… Read more
Latest blogs
- The British paedophile who’s still on the run James Kirchick
- Revive the Snooper’s Charter? It’s already obsolete David Blackburn
- Jesse Norman interview: Edmund Burke, our chief of men JP O'Malley
- Lee Rigby named as victim of Woolwich attack Sebastian Payne
- The friendless Help-to-Buy scheme Isabel Hardman
- Nothing to do with Islam? Douglas Murray
- Why it’s not the 1990s all over again for the Tories James Forsyth
