‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured to win.’ So says Seema, the 29-year-old wife of hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen in Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, Lake Success. The relationship between fiction and the world of high finance has a complicated history. Having
In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen again. Erebus, named after a Greek god of darkness, was herself cast into oblivion for the next 170 years, until she was found in 2014, by sonar, submerged off the Arctic coast of Canada. Immediately
‘My spirit moves me to speak of forms changed into new bodies,’ proclaimed Ovid at the beginning of the Metamorphoses: a glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus. Metamorphica is a collection of 53 versions of classical myths as told by Ovid, Homer and the Greek
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To Hell and Back, in these pages exactly three years ago, I compared our continent in 1945 to a punch-drunk boxer rising from the canvas with both eyes blacked. How, I wondered, would Kershaw handle the
‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl of a silver moon pours milk out on the river.’ The first reason to read Sarah Perry is right there. She was born and bred a writer and without that, a novelist is worth little.
‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more unequal and simply more relentless than ever before. The sense of a football club being rooted to its locality has been shattered. Globalisation, and hyper-commercialisation, means that local owners have been replaced by ‘speculators and
The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands to a distance of 500 miles from London in a direct line’, and opportunities to meet distinguished foreign visitors. As it nears its bicentenary, John Martin Robinson has produced a thorough, scholarly and highly readable
The final moments of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall see its central protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, trying to banish ghosts. Assailed by memories of his orchestration of the execution of his rival Thomas More, the sight of his head on a block, the ‘sickening sound of the axe on flesh’, Cromwell turns to two sources of
As the wordy title of this book and the name of its author suggest, this is a faux-archaic, fogeyish journey around England’s oddest vicars. The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie is, though, the real thing: a young curate in the Church of England. Yes, he’s given to sometimes tiresome jocularity: he describes himself as ‘a Bon Viveur
Such was the perceived low standard of the 62 books recently submitted for the 2018 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, that the organisers withheld the award, saying that not a single title prompted the ‘unanimous, abundant laughter’ required. Like the lottery it rolls over to next year instead. Thank goodness then for the return of
As an emigrant from Scotland, I was taken aback by the weird foreignness of the south of England. Some of the south’s strangeness took a while to register — for example, just how crowded it was down here, and how very much warmer: it was my third summer in the south before it dawned on
Sing muse, begins The Iliad, of the wrath of Achilles. We are dropped straight into the tenth year of the Trojan war, in the middle of the Greek encampment outside the besieged city. The great warrior Achilles has been awarded a woman, Briseis, in recognition of his victories. The same distribution of booty sees Agamemnon,
Novels today do not want to be done. Thank Anthony Burgess and John Fowles for this, most immediately, but alternate endings, or the purposeful failure to finish, run long and deep in fiction in English, all the way back to Laurence Sterne and ‘I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s —.’ Modern novels shear
Transcription, Kate Atkinson’s 11th novel, sees her returning to the detective fiction she honed in her series about Jackson Brodie, the haunted private eye who, after the murder of his young sister, chased the killers of girls. It also pursues some of the themes of her more recent fictions, Life After Life and A God
Ever since enlivenment of the primordial blob, before thoughts were first verbalised, all nature has always been motivated by a dynamic ambition to improve, to grow stronger, more agile, inventive and fertile. The successful continuously grow more successful; the failures disappear. This selective, upward process has been defined as evolution. Dr Adam Rutherford, a British
Poor old Henry II: once fêted as one of England’s greatest kings, he has long been neglected. Accessible books on Henry were few and far between until, like the proverbial buses, three came along in fairly rapid succession. Richard Barber’s 2015 contribution to Penguin’s Monarchs series offers a concise and excellent summary of Henry’s reign;
The last time I saw a copy of the New Musical Express — the ferociously influential 1970s pop paper which plucked me from working-class provincial obscurity at the age of 17 and set me on the radiant way to fame, fortune and utter fabulousness — it was in a rain-lashed Shaftesbury Avenue, its humble bin
Sir Stephen Sedley read English at Cambridge and Lord Dyson Classics at Oxford. Both switched to law and achieved high judicial office, the former a senior Lord Justice of Appeal, the latter as Master of the Rolls. Both were effective advocates as well as admired judges (not always the case). Both clearly enjoyed these two
Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, and Trafalgar on the dunes near Burnham Thorpe, but Britain’s secret war against Napoleon was won in less wholesome places. ‘This is a book about propaganda, spying
‘Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.’ This is the most frustrating part of being alienated and young. You hope that there’s a better life in store
