Book Reviews

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort was the Triple Goddess. The most notable advocate of this theory was the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Then came revisionists led by Norman Cohn. Examination of witch trials suggested there had been no witchcraft: it was a ‘social construct’ of the Christian patriarchy persecuting innocent women, as it had innocent Jews indicted for the same satanic practices. Professor Hutton is a follower of Cohn. His study, by ideological necessity, makes no reference to the historical and modern evidence that European witches used hallucinogenic drugs which produced psychedelic sensations of flying, time-space

In the sixth form we’d get assigned essays to be written over the Christmas holidays. I always did these right away, either on Friday night or Saturday morning. Not because I liked writing but because the homework cast such a blight over the holiday that it was best to get it over with. I look back on that period as a precocious summit of self-discipline. I’d love to recapture that iron resolve now, more than 40 years later, when it takes longer and longer to settle down to things, to fight off the dread of having to concentrate, when it seems likely that the only parole from this life sentence

Of course I began with pen and ink and paper, and paper was expensive in terms of pocket money, so I asked for W.H. Smith tokens for Christmas. Then a neighbour brought up a stash of assorted old office notebooks from hiding somewhere, so the first novel was written in ‘Ledger’ and ‘Salaries’. I wrote by hand, on A4 ruled with feint and margin, for the next 20 years, making notes in whatever was to hand, often those red shiny Silvine ones from Woolworths. Those notebooks and MSs are now safely housed in handsome red boxes in Eton College library. When the books were finished I typed them up on

We live in an age when sequels to, and re-imaginings of, the classics, seem to be a larger part of the literary landscape than ever before. We’re seeing a steady stream of new Ian Fleming, new Agatha Christie, new Robert Ludlum, new Jane Austen, even new PG Wodehouse. What’s the attraction of these books? And what does it feel like, as a writer, to step into the shoes of the greats? In this week’s podcast I ask Bonnie MacBird, who’s now on her second Sherlock Holmes novel, Unquiet Spirits, and Anthony O’Neill, who in Dr Jekyll and Mr Seek takes on the mantle of Stevenson, about the lure of the

Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own. In 2014, his second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His latest book is a state-of-the-globalised-nation novel which gives human particularity to those deadened concepts we pass around such as migration, inequality and neoliberalism. A State of Freedom breaks into five chapters, each telling the story of a distinct individual in India, whose connection to the others is only fully revealed in the final pages. Mukherjee has observed wryly that due to stereo-typical ideas about the Indian novel, whatever their formal properties, his fictions

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been raped and impregnated by her German ‘boss’ and had hanged herself after victory rather than give birth to a ‘little Fritz’. Albina Gantimurova remembered nearly shooting an adolescent member of the German Volkssturm in Berlin before he burst into tears and took her hand. Svetlana Alexievich finished The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of