Anyone who has read Moby-Dick will recognise the moment, 32 chapters in, when their line of attention, hitherto slackly paying out, snags. Having spirited us briskly through Manhattan, New Bedford and Nantucket, and having flushed Ahab from his lair on to the deck of the Pequod, Herman Melville divagates into a disquisition on whale taxonomies.
My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a septuagenarian has an air of juvenile delinquency about her — got me into trouble as a teenage writer on the music press. Sent to review the hot new American group Talking Heads, who were in
It is surely significant that Ed Parnell’s first novel The Listeners was an updated examination of themes latent in Walter de la Mare’s famously spooky poem of that title. The author credits this predilection for the macabre to an aunt’s VHS recordings of the Quatermass stories in the 1970s, when he was just a small
In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character of Jo March, the tomboy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Jo, it will be recalled, is the sister who marries a professor, years older than her, a German immigrant called Friedrich Bhaer, who is
Trying to describe the outcome of the Wars of the Roses — the fall of the House of York — in genre terms has long been an uncertain business. When Shakespeare completed his first tetralogy with Richard III, which ends with the collapse of Yorkist hopes at Bosworth Field, the printers of the earliest quarto
There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when the author trains her binoculars on an animal in the distance. She is on an archaeological dig in Quinhagak, a Yup’ik village in Alaska. Unsure as to what the creature is — perhaps a bear,
James Sallis has a modus operandi: never to waste a word. Sarah Jane (No Exit Press, £8.99) follows this stricture well, using a sparse yet poetic style to tell the story of a woman born on the wrong side of town to bad parents, who wanders from one lowly job to another, one unsavoury man
‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing for children involves the adult writer, and the child that writer once was; the present child reader, and the adult that child will become.’ Edith Nesbit, one of the greatest writers for children, was brilliantly
This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a 1972 ‘folk horror’ novel by Jonathan Buckley. Now John Murray reveal it as the third novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, whose gothic debut, The Loney, received widespread plaudits. Folk horror, a term popularised by the
It is to Nick Lowe’s everlasting credit that in May 1977, a few months after David Bowie released the album Low, Lowe issued an EP entitled Bowi. Appearing on Stiff Records at the height of punk, the record contained ‘Marie Provost’ (sic), an account in two and a half minutes of the unhappy life and
Since 1903, when Erskine Childers warned of the rising tide of German militarism that preceded the first world war in The Riddle of the Sands, spy fiction has enthralled and chilled its readers by holding a cloudy mirror to the murkier corners of international politics. During the Cold War, John le Carré’s novels were hugely
Depending on how you count, we are in the midst of the second or third AI hype-bubble since the 1960s, but the absolute current state of the art in machine cognition is still just about being better than humans at playing chess or being about as good as human beings at analysing some medical scans.
This is a timely book. It addresses the challenges of a fractious and fractured Europe. The first word of the title means ‘truth’ in Russian, and the author’s point is that we have collectively lost sight of that essential commodity. Rory MacLean, whose previous books include Stalin’s Nose, Under the Dragon and Falling for Icarus,
‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking’, carolled the company of Cole Porter’s 1934 Broadway smash musical Anything Goes. Eighty-five years on, in this age of Love Island and Naked Attraction, what wouldn’t you give for a retooled version? Not that the song is wholly out of date. When
The story of Jamal Khashoggi’s death is well known. A prominent Saudi journalist, he walked into his nation’s consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 to obtain divorce papers permitting him to marry his fiancée Hatice Cengiz. Eighteen minutes later, he was drugged and then murdered by a hit squad sent from Riyadh. After another
In the autumn of 1987, after London had been hit by a fierce storm, Simon Jenkins wandered through Bloomsbury and noticed that workers clearing away the fallen plane trees were finding it hard to cut through the branches. When he looked closely, he saw this was because their chainsaws kept snapping against embedded fragments of
Double identities have never been rare: Norman French conquered England. Anglo Irish led its armies to victory. German Jews helped create the modern world. Perhaps thinking of the many Germans living in London, and British in Hamburg, Munich and Dresden, Prince Albert’s eldest daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, invented another hybrid: ‘Anglo-Germans’. This new
Richard Mabey is the grand old man of nature writing. He has produced 40 books in his noble crusade against the enemies of natural life, so a certain amount of repetition can be forgiven in Turning the Boat for Home, since in the opinion of many (not only Prince Charles) the dangers in some places
Zadie Smith’s first collection of short stories shows that she can pack all the astute social commentary of her novels just as deftly into the short form. A case in point is ‘Sentimental Education’, a comic homage to Flaubert featuring a decidedly unsentimental protagonist, Monica. Middle-aged (‘Next stop menopause and no more denim’) and feeling