Tim Winton is a prodigy among novelists, publishing his first novel when barely out of his teens and one of the great masterpieces of world fiction when only just 30. Like many such novelists — Thomas Mann and Javier Marias come to mind — his later work has tended to explore exquisite technical points, inviting
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
David Lodge’s writing career spans nearly 50 years. Coincidentally, my son was reading (and hugely enjoying) How Far Can You Go? when Deaf Sentence arrived for review: it seemed generationally fitting that the teenager should be reading about sex and religion, and his mother a novel about deafness, death, erectile dysfunction and the search for
This author said of her biography of the wealthy Siegfried Sassoon, ‘A study of his life is a study of an age’. So is this one, from another aspect, deep down among the poverty of Jewish immigrants at the end of the 19th century, and it is warming to learn how the more successful of
This book is about large-scale organised crime. The Sicilian mafia was the prototype which gave its name to a whole class of criminal activity. Hence Misha Glenny’s title. But he is not much concerned with these declining mastodons of the international crime scene. The focus of the book, and its main strength, is its coverage
‘Love is but a frailty of the mind when ’tis not to ambition joined.’ So Thomas Seymour, destined to be Catherine Parr’s fourth and last husband, expressed a notion taken as read in Tudor families of sufficient standing to seek social and financial ladders to climb. Catherine understood the ways of the world. When at
Was Sergey Prokofiev a better diarist than a composer? We embark on this new volume with the 23-year-old enfant terrible living in St Petersburg. We are there during the ten days that shook the world, and although initially unshaken, Prokofiev escaped the turmoil of revolution and in 1918 headed for San Francisco. The following years
During the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao called for intellectual city-dwellers to spend time in the countryside and be ‘rusticated’. The official paper the People’s Daily voiced Mao’s call for integration in 1968: ‘they must be re-educated by workers, peasants and soldiers under the guidance of the correct line’. As a consequence, millions of students were
