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The night has a thousand eyes

From a young age – ten perhaps – the author Dan Richards has had a strained relationship with night-time. Grappling with insomnia, he would take ‘the homeopathic approach to [his] waking nightmares’, rereading Moominland Midwinter despite its existential terrors. Even now, he writes, he finds it easier to sleep when he is not at home.

The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann

The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly

Amid the alien corn: Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino

‘I am an Adina,’ the four-year-old protagonist of Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland writes to her extraterrestrial superiors on Planet Cricket Rice, which is light years away from Earth. ‘Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass,’ she adds, using the fax machine her mother retrieved from their neighbour’s trash. ‘DESCRIBE BUNNIES,’ they respond, sparking a dialogue that

My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman

‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she

Richard Ellmann: the man and his masks

Richard Ellmann’s acclaimed life of James Joyce was published in 1959, with a revised and expanded edition appearing in 1982. The first edition, the work of an ambitious young American academic, received what Ellmann’s editor at Oxford University Press described as ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything

The problem with Pascal’s wager

Blaise Pascal resists definition. During a short life (he died in 1662, aged 39) he invented the calculator, laid the foundations for probability theory and created the first public transport system. He was also an austere Catholic, whose call for a return to strict Augustinian doctrines put him outside the religious mainstream. As a philosopher,

Julie Burchill

A David Bowie devotee with the air of Adrian Mole

When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows. First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man,

Driven to extremes: The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits, reviewed

In a break from his tetralogy about the Essinger family, and following on from The Sidekick (a kind of Humboldt’s Gift with basketball), Ben Markovits now takes us on a road trip across America. The Rest of Our Lives explores marital breakdown, betrayal, the empty nest and a myriad mid-life malaises, including life-threatening illness. It’s

It’s trust in English kindness that keeps the migrants coming

Halfway through The Shawshank Redemption, Andy and Red, sitting in their filthy prison yard, discuss hope. Red thinks it’s a dangerous thing, which can lead to despair if not fulfilled. But Andy insists on hoping for freedom, and his hope is finally rewarded. The astonishing thing about the migrants and refugees Horatio Clare meets in

The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the

It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it