Book Reviews

To be a member of a good audience is exhilarating. The sounds that it makes around you are as much a part of the show as the sounds from the stage: the sound of alert anticipation before the curtain rises — the sound of silence — the sound of implications being understood — the sound of generosity in laughter and response. This description occurs early in the first half of the collection, where Frayn describes the processes involved in the writing, rehearsal, re-writing and performance of his original plays. Many of these reflections and ruminations relate to what is often called — though he never, I think, uses the word

Thanks to Ross Douthat for alerting me to this trailer for the forthcoming movie of Brideshead Revisited: As Ross says, this may not bear much resemblance to the novel you read. But come on, isn’t this just delightfully over-the-top and wonderfully trashy? I doubt it matters that the adaptation – Emma Thomson as Lady Marchmain notwithstanding – seems certain to be utter tripe. I remember that when Andrew Davies announced that his adaptation would take the view that the book’s really about how catholicism ruins everyone’s life, there was much umbrage and outrage at this desecration of Waugh’s intent. But there’s little necessity for an adaptation to be faithful to

Megan hails Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle* and makes a pretty persuasive case. But what happens when you lose or break your Kindle? Does that mean you’ve lost your library too? James Joyner is not quite so convinced and complains: And the fact that e-books are still priced at 50-80 percent the sticker price of the hardcover books strikes me as outrageous, given that the cost of materials, production, transport, and so forth have gone away and one doesn’t end up with a nice objet d’art for one’s shelves. Not so fast! Authors have to get paid too! Now if every book were sold electronically I doubt you would see much

Laura Wilson specialises in acutely observed psychological thrillers, in most cases set in the recent past. Stratton’s War (Orion, £18.99) marks a departure for her in that it is the start of a series. Set in London during the phony war before the Blitz, it kicks off with an ageing and almost forgotten silent film star impaled on the spikes of a Fitzrovia railing. DI Ted Stratton is unconvinced that it is suicide, and his investigations lead him deep into Soho’s flourishing criminal underworld. Meanwhile in a rather smarter part of London, the glamorous and unhappily married Diana Calthrop, a newly recruited MI5 agent, grows increasingly concerned about the activities

Via Norm comes this entertaining, if fairly pointless, parlour game: pick a novelist to represent each letter of the alphabet and a book of theirs you’ve read (and enjoyed!). My list: A: Kingsley Amis, Lucky JimB: John Buchan, GreenmantleC: Albert Camus, L’EtrangerD: Alexandre Dumas: The Three MusketeersE: F: F Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the NightG: Alasdair Gray, LanarkH: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also RisesI: Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let You GoJ: Jerome K Jerome: Three Men in a BoatK: James Kennaway, Tunes of GloryL: Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our TimeM: Andrei Makine, Le Testament FrancaisN:O: Flann O’Brien, At Swim Two BirdsP: Q:R: Joseph Roth: The Radetzky MarchS: Stendhal: Le Rouge

Once Upon a Time in the North is not to be confused with The Book of Dust, the big book which Philip Pullman has been promising for some time in interviews about His Dark Materials trilogy and what happens next. It is, instead, a short, elegant, simple story about what happened between two of his best-loved characters — the Texan aeronaut and the talking polar bear — a long time before the events of Northern Lights (1995). And while the title pays tribute to a classic western, and the story itself, although set in an Arctic port, has about it more than a whiff of cowboy gunshot, this little volume