Book Reviews

Jeannette Winterson’s timely intervention in the Booker prize debate last month reminded us that ‘novels that last are language-based’. On that basis, Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, might have been a worthy candidate for the Booker 2011, had it been written in English.   In this latest offering by French literature’s preeminent provocateur, we follow the career of Jed Martin, a successful artist with no ambition to be one. Struggling to make sense of his growing fame after breaking up with ‘one of the five most beautiful women in Paris’, a leggy Russian blonde named Olga, Martin befriends the novelist Michel Houellebecq — a depressed,

If product placement makes you bad tempered then yesterday’s papers won’t have done much good for your blood pressure. Whatever were Lurpak thinking, letting their spreadable butter be featured on the Number 10 breakfast table in Cameron’s Sunday Times photoshoot? How sad that this revolutionary foodstuff, probably the best invention since the internet, will now be forever tainted by spin. Even more devastating, however, was the revelation that a carefully positioned copy of Literary Review will appear on M’s desk in the new Bond film. “For your highbrows only!” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday, in the kind of headline that gives punning a bad name. The scandal, it transpired, was

You can always find a thief in financial markets. That is where the money is. Most frauds are quite dull affairs, and some are never uncovered. A few, however, are spectacular. The scale of loss, or the glamour of the perpetrator, or the failure of the ‘system’ to spot and prevent the crookery, may contribute to make a good story. One case, almost within living memory, which has all of these elements, was that of Gerard Lee Bevan. He was born in 1869 into a highly respected City banking family. The Bevans were among the founders of Barclays and continued to be involved in the management of the bank until

Is the world in need of a yet another Sherlock Holmes story? Well, with the successful publication of Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk it seems it is. Riding on the crest of the wave created by BBC’s ingenious series Sherlock, which brings the brilliant detective into the 21st century, and the Robert Downey Jnr blockbuster movies, which portray Holmes as a scruffy Victorian bruiser, Horowitz’s novel, authorised by the Conan Doyle estate no less, attempts to give us an authentic Sherlockian adventure. Of course, creating copycat Holmes tales is nothing new. There have been literally hundreds of them over the years. Indeed in 1954 Doyle’s own son Adrian, with

It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text, instantly familiar, is displayed alongside a collection of Golding’s other, less celebrated books, highlighting the true paradox of his literary career.   While there’s no shame in growing fat off the royalties of a single masterpiece, one of the many things John Carey’s magnificent biography of William Golding made clear is that he never wanted

Charles Moore’s column in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine contains a wickedly funny literary item. Here it is, a day early, for readers of this blog: The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray, she has chosen the pre-war children’s classic Moorland Mousie by ‘Golden Gorse’, about a wild Exmoor pony. The tale is told in Mousie’s voice. The Duchess says the book ‘brings back happy memories of the many hours that my sister and I spent galloping over the moors with Moorland Mousie and his friends’. Thanks to