The people in Hanif Kureishi’s short fiction are rarely in the first flush of youth. Adam, the bleary sixtysomething protagonist of the title story, soon allows himself to be talked into experimenting with a new physical frame. Even at 45, Rick, the focus of ‘Remember This Moment, Remember Us’, is darkly conscious of having fetched
Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole – in short, the world. He is ‘certain’ that if there hadn’t been a disastrous fire in Peking’s Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor
INSIDE SAHARAby Basil PaoWeidenfeld, £25, pp. 200, ISBN 0297843044 Michael Palin is a decent chap, I thought, after bumping into him for a nanosecond at the Hatchards Authors of the Year party a few months ago. It was just long enough for the briefest exchange of desert tales before he was mobbed by growing numbers
Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing
Two running stories are brought to a close in Death’s Jest-Book. The first was introduced in the novel in which we first met Ellie, Peter Pascoe’s future wife. An Advancement of Learning, published in 1971, has that great team – politically correct Sergeant Peter Pascoe and fat, slobbish, thuggish Superintendent Andy Dalziel – investigating a
THE ILLUSTRATED ZULEIKA DOBSONby Max Beerbohm, with an introduction by N. John HallYale, £9.99, pp. 432, ISBN 0300097328 Max Beerbohm wrote a tale called The Happy Hypocrite, a reversal of his friend Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s about a rake who puts on a saintly mask in order to win the love of
From Apicius to the Ivy: Roy Strong, the possessor of 800 cookbooks, has written a fascinating and scholarly study of social eating from Greece to the 21st century, a single-volume synthesis of the most significant work published in various countries and various languages over the last two decades, polished with style, bibliographical knowledge and an
The distillation of a vast quantity of historical material into a tolerably readable concentrate is a considerable skill, the historian’s equivalent of good popular science, and the late Professor Porter manifestly had that skill. To produce a history of medicine, little more than 150 pages long, that is not a completely arid list of names
Like most human beings, most novelists are neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. This poses a problem for reviewers. A good novelist can write interestingly about mediocre characters; but even a superlative reviewer may find it difficult to write interestingly about mediocre novels. In consequence, reviewers all too often rush to the extremes of proclaiming
This is one of the most devastating but, at the same time, restrained and balanced indictments, among the many that have appeared, of the conduct of the Roman Catholic Church in the face of the Holocaust. It is restrained in that it avoids extreme positions, let alone emotive language, even disagreeing with the expression ‘Hitler’s
