The joy – and danger – of these extended conversations with film-makers is that they will skew your critical faculties. The joy – and danger – of these extended conversations with film-makers is that they will skew your critical faculties. So it is with Amy Raphael’s book Danny Boyle (Faber, £14.99). Until sifting through its
Iain Martin examines Gordon Brown’s confident policies before and after disaster struck and finds them wanting In a previous life, working on Scottish newspapers, I used to take delivery of the occasional article offered by Gordon Brown. The then Chancellor of the Exchequer or one of his aides would call— on the way to the
It has been said that the world of story- telling contains two fundamental plots — a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Here we have two journeys, and one unexpected visitor, from three debut novelists who show great promise. In the first, the stranger arriving in town is the eponymous Mr
The Oxus, that vast central Asian river that rises somewhere in the Afghan Pamirs, has fascinated explorers for centuries. Its name gives us the land of Oxiana. Yet few Europeans had set eyes on it before the second world war. Robert Byron’s 1937 book, The Road to Oxiana, is an account, among other things, of
Like many bookworms, once or twice a year I am struck down with reading doldrums. Then the stash of paperbacks on my bedside table seems less a collection of future delights than a useless repository of dust. Nothing pleases. This disgruntlement generally passes of its own accord, but sometimes it takes the recommendation of a
In the course of a lifetime of fiction reviewing, I have come to the conclusion that, though my colleagues are prepared doggedly to persevere with the reading of a novel from its muddled opening to its inconsequential end, they will read no more than four or five stories in a collection. What always guides them
The author describes this book as an ‘auto- biographical novel’, but since it would be quite beyond me to distinguish fact from fiction in this hair-raising account of his childhood years, I propose to treat it as if it were all true, especially as I can’t imagine anyone making any of it up. The author
