More from Books

Snow on snow

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As when soft Snows, brought down by Western Gales, Silent descend and spread on all the Vales . . . Nature bears all one Face, looks coldly bright, And mourns her lost Variety in White. Unlike

Love at first bite

Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high years, a supreme London beauty. She preserved her Dresden perfection by denying her husband conjugal access. Bram consoled himself with warmer but more dangerous ladies of the night; such satisfactions came at greater cost than

Dark and graphic

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the message, ‘I was you.’ Doubting yourself. Knowing you don’t love your girlfriend. Waking beside someone beautiful and new, only to notice a filigree of knife-scars etched across her breasts. If, sensitive reader, these ingredients make

Double trouble | 8 December 2016

Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after reading the first quarter. It seems to be a dreary saga about three generations of the Tye family. The background is of an intellectual, comfortably off, left-wing family from a milieu in which Polly Toynbee

Mary Wakefield

The unkindest cult of all

When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the Book of Isaiah. Yisrayl (born Bill) lived with his many disciples and several wives in a compound carved out of the red dirt scrub near Abilene, Texas. His cult was called the House of Yahweh,

We’re all snobs really

D.J. Taylor’s clever dissection of snobs is really two books in one. Scattered throughout are entertaining, delicious (initially), solemnly related nuggets of hardcore snobbery. He writes brilliantly, for example, about the diarist and National Trust employee James Lees-Milne, who liked a world that knew its place (ideally beneath him). Lees-Milne was steeped so far in

From man to beast and back again

If there’s one shared characteristic of the so-called ‘new nature writing’ it is a failure, with a few notable exceptions, even to approach what up until very recently writing about the non-human had as its core ambition; that is, to dissolve the ego, to melt the self in the recognition of the other and, through

Melanie McDonagh

Children’s books for Christmas | 1 December 2016

Maurice Sendak, no mean judge, observed that William Nicholson’s Clever Bill was ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’. I’d go along with that if I didn’t think Nicholson’s other picture book, The Pirate Twins, even better, with its lovely opening, ‘One evening, on the sands, Mary found the pirate twins.’ Now Clever Bill

High priestess of horror

A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her immediately. That was ten years ago and she has since become one of a handful of talismanic writers I reach for when craving literary succour. An undisputed master of the gothic and the uncanny— We

Ripeness is all

‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.’ In fact, cheese animates the Bible and — building on Job’s searing image of the womb — its coagulation became an emblem of the Immaculate Conception, endorsed

A choice of gardening books | 1 December 2016

Garden design usually breaks out of its confines to become part of the general consciousness only in Chelsea Flower Show week, but this year there have been so many events to mark the tercentenary of the birth of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown — the most prolific and talented designer of the 18th-century landscape garden — that

Rifling through a writer’s desk

Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book by Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book at all. It’s a celebration of the life of the novel and a manifesto for the death of the author, told in a collection of interviews, letters from journalists requesting interviews, letters within letters, stories within letters, and letters from Ferrante’s editor

For king and countryside

In July 1915 the poet Edward Thomas enlisted as a soldier with the Artists’ Rifles, even though, at the age of 37, he had no obligation to do so. When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked why, he scooped up a handful of earth and replied: ‘Literally, for this.’ John Lewis-Stempel’s new book is persuasive that

Joking apart | 24 November 2016

A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which could be a signal of comedy to come; and indeed he strews his novel’s pages with punchlines — good, bad-taste and groan-worthy. But this is gallows humour at its darkest: Grossman beckons us into a

Julie Burchill

Falling out with Love

Volcanic fallings out within bands are an ever-recurring motif in the history of rock music. There’s an obvious reason for this: most musicians pick up an instrument in the first place not because they hear the call of Euterpe but because they’re sailing on the HMS Ain’t Gettin’ None. They dream of fame, fortune and

Heaven, hell and Northampton

A century ago, Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ to music. The lyric had been written 100 years earlier and was part of Blake’s desperate lament for the fallenness of England. What might have been the golden streets of a holy city was instead a place of mourning, the site of dark satanic mills. He

A choice of art books | 24 November 2016

Suitably for a year so full of cataclysms and disturbing portents, 2016 is the quincentenary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch. He was of course the supreme painter of hell, with choking darkness, livid flames and the most grippingly monstrous menagerie of devils in the history of art — duck-billed figures on skates, demons with