Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking of higher things they can’t be expected to do prosaic stuff like take the rubbish out or pay the gas bill. They tend not to enjoy jokes, much less teasing. Worse still, they’re convinced they’re
The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a puppy playing nearby. Seeing the little dog amusing itself with a dirty cloth gave the friar an epiphany. Suso realised that redemption is granted not to those who mortify their flesh — for to do
From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has interviewed and sometimes befriended many leading artists and scrutinised their works close up in their own environment. He has found that artistically creative men and women are not really very different from normal people. The
Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s written her third, The Confession. Like The Muse, it is a double narrative, moving between the early 1980s and 2017 (a departure from the historical settings of her previous books). In 1980, 20-year-old Elise meets
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed
In Whitechapel, in the mid 19th century, rolling and selling cigars was a way for a newly arrived immigrant to scrape a living. This is what Samuel Glückstein did, after he landed in London from Belgium in 1843. He built up his cigar business until he could send for his parents and siblings. One of
Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist, the wacky, the mimsical and the nastily satirical. But Brian Catling is a genuine surrealist novelist, and it no doubt helps that his artwork is surreal (he is professor of fine art at Ruskin College,
Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s the hope. In a large university lecture hall, I remember a consultant standing in front of a PowerPoint slide showing two triangles, one widening to its base, the other tapering to a point. They represented
Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her own life aged 58, and you may have one or two prior expectations. They will probably not include a flirtatious dinner with an enthralled Evelyn Waugh (‘so attentive and kind’) in a Copenhagen restaurant so
The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that
This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his sloop along the west coast of Ireland, then the west coast of Scotland. The Summer Isles lie at his journey’s end, but in fact he is unable to land, owing to unfriendly headwinds — hence
Novelist, essayist, painter, poet, composer. Oh yes, and pianist: Stephen Hough does all of these things very well — and one of them superlatively. Most of us will know Hough as a dazzling but thoughtful concert pianist, at home with almost all repertoire, but with a special affinity for 19th- and early 20th- century works.
Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising. Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took
In 1993, the photographer Peter Menzel travelled across the globe to capture our material world. In each country, he asked a family to empty their home and pose in front of their possessions. In Texas, the Skeen family held up their large illustrated Bible, surrounded by their Ford pickup truck, their mini-van and their dune
It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s a literary embarras de richesse, whose centre can’t really hold, yet it’s written with the brilliant bravura of a writer who can really, really write. More to the point, it’s also funny and touching and
In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of
Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’
Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well… everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of
‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, at a time when young girls, carefully and modestly brought up to become wives to the regime’s male elite, are beginning to rebel;