‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga. Deeply read — if not rooted
Ian Massey is a writer, artist and lecturer and this is his first book. There have been two previous books on Procktor: a ghosted autobiography and a slim volume to celebrate his 60th birthday. About the second, one reviewer wrote that what was next required was ‘a full retrospective to answer the critical question that
Once upon a time, an untrustworthy story- teller seemed rather an enterprising creation — and some great books were written this way, like Lolita and The Good Soldier (from which Blake Morrison takes an epigraph). But nowadays having a fibber as compère seems painfully predictable. Only if our dodgy raconteur is strikingly engaging or funny
It was the neon lit windowless corridor in the surgery in Dumfries that did it. It was June 1993 when Maggie Keswick and her husband Charles Jencks heard the prognosis that she had two to three months to live as the breast cancer had spread to her liver and her bones. In fact Maggie was
If stupidity is defined by the inability to connect an oft-repeated policy with the failure that it always produces, then Irish republicanism is easily the stupidest political movement in Europe. The claim of Irish republicanism is that it unites Catholic, Protestant and dissenter under the common title, Irishman. This is mountebank bluster. In fact, Irish
Ignore the title, with its subliminal echoes of Mills & Boon. Aminatta Forna’s magnificent second novel is not really about love. Its themes are far grittier, and all the more compelling for it: war, loss, and how a society emerging from civil strife must reinvent its own history, fabricating a tolerable narrative in order to
Contrary to the Romantic image of him as a solitary scribbler in a garret, William Shakespeare was a deeply collaborative artist. He wrote his plays for a particular theatre company, tailoring each part to the actor he knew would perform it. He began his career patching up old plays in the existing repertoire and ended
Long before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 and began their advance across France, preparations were underway for what to do about the civilians who had been displaced by the German occupiers. What everyone feared was a repeat of the chaos that followed the first world war, when refugees and returning prisoners of
On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing up. On the first page of this book there is a sentence so extraordinary that I had to read it several times to make sure my eyes
‘My wife doesn’t understand me,’ the man said to his Jewish psychoanalyst. ‘I should be so lucky!’ was the reply. It’s a common complaint, not being understood. Yet surely only the most shameless would like others to know us exactly as we are or as we know ourselves. This is one reason some writers shrink
