Death

A preoccupation with death is felt from the start of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, which opens with Francesca Stubbs, in her seventies, considering whether her last words will be ‘you bloody old fool’ or ‘you fucking idiot’. Fran is central to the web of characters that populate the book, linked by varying degrees of friendship and kinship, but tied more firmly together by the approach of death. Drabble squares up to old age with pragmatism: she shows us its terrible physical pain, loneliness and expense, but lightens what could threaten to be a grim read with observational humour, delighting in her characters’ eccentric pleasures. Fran, for instance, has a peculiar,

Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day job in IT, battles with drugs, insanity, visions of the Devil and a variety of Christian saints while trying to come to terms with the fallout from the Aids crisis. As that crisis wore on, ignored by the powers-that-be, Jacob’s lover and all of his closest friends died, leaving him with an apartment full of ashes and an eye-watering variety of instructions for their disposal. Yet, while echoes of Bulgakov’s masterpiece inform The Angel of History from first to last (there is even a cat named Behemoth), Alameddine has created

There was a touch of Raymond Radiguet, the young literary sensation of 1920s Paris, about Tara Browne. In life poetically beautiful, poetry-imbued, tender and trusting, deliciously precocious and eerily presumptive, androgenous in looks but not desires, Tara died —‘without knowing it’, as Cocteau said of Radiguet — tragically, but given his penchant for very fast cars, unsurprisingly young. And, like Radiguet, having touched the lives of those who knew him with a kind of iridescence that remained with them more than half a century later. This lengthy biography, which, given its subject’s foreshortened life is necessarily somewhat repetitive, has gathered their still-vivid recollections, and if it reads more as a

Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed novelist: perhaps one of the last generation of novelists to change both the art she practised and the world. Reading this splendid biography, it is hard to avoid the false conclusion that she always knew exactly what she was doing. Her life, in its swerves and unexpected corners, always turns out to be contributing to her work; how clever of her, one starts to think, to get a job on a local news-paper, to go to Japan, to have an array of dotty, oppressive or plain witchy aunts, mother and grandmother…. Of course it was not like that. Carter’s life seems rich and

Hitler, ever seeking to emulate strong German hero types (especially if their Christian name was Frederick), unsurprisingly named his great invasion of Russia ‘Operation Barbarossa’. It is in this context that the name — meaning ‘Redbeard’ — is best known today. Apart from that, a rather clunky eponymous Italian film from 2011 and a presence in the underground heavy metal music scene, awareness of the medieval German emperor outside of Germany and Italy is very limited. This owes much to the fact that John Freed’s biography is the first in English for half a century. A 700-page doorstopper, this impressive, learned book certainly makes amends for this previously serious oversight.

Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey Fitz’, became mayor of Boston, and Patrick J. Kennedy was a saloon-keeper and failed senatorial candidate who sent his sons to Harvard. ‘Kick’ was the fourth child, nicknamed for her ebullient personality, but born just as her mother, Rose, was thinking of leaving her serially unfaithful husband, Joe Kennedy Snr, who made his huge fortune from Hollywood studios and booze. Kick spent her early years schooled at, and confined to, convents, except when the whole family escaped to Hyannis Port or Palm Beach. So when her father managed to wangle