This hefty volume is misleadingly titled. It is not an escapist sort of travel book, ushering the visitor around the homelands and houses of the Italian literati. It is a selection of the author’s previous literary articles, mostly book reviews for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and believe
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp, the Athenian general Xenophon wrote a briefing paper designed to help his city negotiate the aftermath of a disastrous war. His proposals mixed supply-side reform with Keynesian stimulus. The regulatory powers of Athenian officials, so
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped When told it was all in the future, and not in the past, And someone (who?) had forgotten to give him the script. He tried his damnedest, but there were other factors That made the
The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid, holding a heart not a mirror. Not your average mermaid, then; but as the folklorist and playwright Sophia Kingshill delves further into their complex cultural history, it becomes clear there’s no such thing. Mermaids can
A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s House, in Oxford, the Anglo-Catholic seminary where he trained for ordination in the Church of England. He jumped ship at the end of his first year and travelled to the wilder shores of atheism, writing
‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966. Now, as the British Film Institute celebrates the life and work of ‘the writer who redefined TV drama’, Oberon Books, with perfect timing, offers this collection of Potter’s critical abuse in journalism and interviews at
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States a decade ago, but Ames hasn’t published a novel since, so the title still stands. He has produced a collection of short stories, several volumes of essays and a comic in the interim, as well
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist. Achebe objected to a story that used Africa as a setting for ‘the break-up of one petty European mind’, and depicted Africans as nameless savages. Achebe’s lecture —
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their races and careers, and talks to them about their lives. Part of what’s moving about the book is the sense you get that these athletes (the children mostly of subsistence farmers from the Rift Valley
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In this new volume of stories from the American writer Ken Kalfus no one, innocent or guilty, can be counted safe. The novella which gives this collection its title is an audacious fictional riff on a
Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding. But Michael Williams is unafraid to state the obvious fact about Britain’s railways, which is that they were far more attractive in the past: It is sometimes tempting to wonder if, deep in every railway
