Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts for the second. ‘I’d like to be a migrant.’ The decision is telling, and frames much of what follows in this curious, delightful, if disjointed book. Neuman is hot property in contemporary Latin American literary
Helen Rappaport’s new book makes no claim to be a complete account of the Russian revolution. Instead it presents a highly readable and fluent description of the events of 1917 in the capital, Petrograd, as experienced by the city’s many foreign residents. Russia’s booming prewar economy had attracted every sort of business person and technical
The year is 1963. A girl is walking around Stepney with a pack of index cards, visiting old residents in their dilapidated houses, drinking strong tea with tinned milk, listening to their stories of happy days past and looking at cracked walls and leaking roofs. As she promises them help on behalf of her employer,
For Jonathan Safran Foer fans and sceptics alike, Here I Am comes as a wonderful gift, a truly painful, honest book which purports to be about a lot of things but is mainly about one thing: the breakdown of a marriage between a whiny, self-obsessed Jewish novelist turned scriptwriter and his blameless wife. Whether or
Never speak on the same platform as Sir Malcolm Rifkind. I tried it once, at a Spectator debate held during the Scottish independence referendum campaign in 2014, and I will not be repeating the experience. The former Foreign Secretary spoke as usual without notes, and with such ringing clarity and confidence that all the other
A more appropriate subtitle to this homage to the queen bees of the interwar years might have been ‘How to Suck Up in Society’, for the servility of these six stately galleons simply beggars belief. Each was a mistress of her art, but the oiliest of the lot has to be Mrs Ronnie Greville, the
Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag and introduced himself as Robinson. Ten minutes later, I found a room to rent. The homeowner’s first name was Crusoe. Get the idea? Although Defoe set his story hundreds of miles away, near the mouth
The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we ask what time it is, we don’t want to know how watches are constructed.’ A telling assertion, considering Lichtenberg’s place and time. For nearly two centuries, the ‘mechanical philosophy’ had ground down tradition and metaphysics
You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you go for a bit of a stroll and might turn here or might turn there, but specifically trails, where you can only follow one route. He likes them because ‘they are a rigidly bounded experience.
‘Clonakilty, God help us,’ my Irish mother would say automatically when we drove into the town, in pious remembrance of those who had died there during the famine. Clonakilty acquires another corpse in Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second novel to feature Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, which is set mainly in a country house nearby. The
There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Somme and Winston Churchill. Rather than rehearse the Enigma story, however, Sinclair McKay describes what happened to the organisation that became GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) during the immediate postwar years. This was
Not all novelists lead a public life. Those who do, however, tend to make a bit of a performance out of it. Beryl Bainbridge’s life, even before she started publishing novels, was an act, and during her period of fame she was famous for presenting herself in a certain way. It was an effective strategy
Assignats are the bane of every student of the French revolution without an economics background. They were the bonds issued by the National Assembly from 1789, underwritten by the sale of newly nationalised church property, and all I ever really grasped about them was that they contributed to rampant inflation. In fact, as Ian Davidson
