Book Reviews

The Peckham Experiment was a radical, if earnest, initiative begun in 1926 in which working-class families were given access to physical activities, such as swimming, as well as workshops and a shot at cultural betterment. It’s into this rather worthy scheme that identical twins, the subjects of Guy Ware’s novel, are born: Charlie and JJ, the offspring of communist parents, who are later orphaned during the Blitz. Both go on to long careers in housing, and the book tracks their progress, alongside themes of ownership and exploitation, against the backdrop of key events in postwar British history. The novel begins on the eve of JJ’s funeral, with Charlie struggling to

As a teenager growing up in Cheshire I had a metal detector. Although I was slightly ashamed of it, I found all sorts of intriguing things: shrapnel, a French coin, a Khartoum Racing Club key ring, an adze and a silver brooch in the shape of a lobster. All went well until I found a second world war bomb in Tatton Park. They had to call out the army, and I got a Grade A bollocking. People hated metal detectors. Since then I haven’t given them much thought; but Nigel Richardson has. An acclaimed travel writer, he was grounded by the Covid pandemic and, like many of us, began to

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow. There are conversations about what I think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately characterful portraits of the Wertheimer family have been displayed together in their own room. This was what the wealthy London art dealer Asher Wertheimer had always intended when he bequeathed these paintings to the nation. Some queried his generous gift on the frankly snobbish and anti-Semitic grounds that it was not for upstart Jewish businessmen to force their likenesses into a national collection. The Conservative MP Sir Charles Oman went so far as to say in the Commons that ‘these clever but extremely repulsive pictures should be placed in a

Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a strained exercise in trying to yoke together two irreconcilable mediums. It is to Anthony Quinn’s credit that his ninth novel, Molly & the Captain, not only succeeds admirably as a centuries-spanning account of the influence and afterlife of the eponymous painting, but manages to say illuminating things about creativity, love and family dynamics in the process. The book is divided into three sections. The first, ‘Merrymounts’, is the shortest, and is written in an 18th-century literary pastiche style that initially jars but soon enthrals. Exploring the relationship between the Gainsboroughesque

‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling image; one that Gaspar, the central character, experiences both literally and figuratively. Bodies are everywhere in this novel – whether dead, undead, dying or decomposing, at swim or making love – and what they feel and what they can know is the intellectual dynamic that underpins plotlines familiar from the work of Stephen King, the films of Guillermo del Toro and the horror drama Stranger Things. The Order grew out of British occultism of the late 19th century and, by the 1980s, when the book opens, is a powerful, shadowy