Literature

While training as a playwright, I was taught that any gun brought onstage must go off. Anton Chekhov said, ‘One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.’ But thinking of firing is not enough. The gun foreshadows the action that will – that must – occur. Its appearance is a contract with the audience. The gun becomes the story, the conflict, and the resolution due to its presence and our expectations. If ‘all the world’s a stage’ it is most noticeably in America where the gun is downstage, front and centre. Its firing has become our narrative. In a nation founded

This is the second article in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the first instalment here. By 1814, two years after he awoke to find himself famous, everyone wanted a piece of Byron. Some got jewellery, several got hair and a fair few got a reputation. Among the most prized of trophies, however, was a sample of verse – not printed, mind, but written out with the warm intimacy of the poet’s hand. In a letter of 23 December 1814, the novelist and society gossip Miss Emily Eden described to Lady Buckinghamshire the febrile hunts she had witnessed at

Though underestimated in the English-speaking world, Nikolai Leskov is one of the greatest of 19th-century Russian writers. Donald Rayfield has described him as ‘Russia’s best-kept secret’. Richard Pevear’s excellent introduction to this selection includes Anton Chekhov’s account of how Leskov — ‘his favourite writer’ — said to him at the beginning of his career, after a night of carousing, ‘I shall anoint you with oil as Samuel did David.  Write.’ This little scene, which could be from one of Leskov’s own stories, perhaps offers a clue as to why he is not more widely recognised. We don’t know whether to laugh at the story or to feel moved by it;

Philip Hensher was one of Granta’s 20 under forty in 2003, so what does he make of the new list? Writing in this week’s Spectator, he says that there are a dozen competent to superb writers on the list but you can keep the rest. ‘When you look at the seven truly regrettable inclusions it is hard to know what the judges were thinking of.’ Philip’s view is that the list ‘seems to have sprung from a list-making corporate machine’ in favour of bland orthodoxy. Philip writes: ‘Previous British lists have had the genuine air of discovery, sometimes uncomfortably so, as the magazine had to feature writers with more comic

James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for The Guardian. From there he moved to America’s The New Republic, then, as of 2007, The New Yorker. He also teaches at Harvard. There is a tendency, therefore, for critics to spend more time reviewing the superlatives other reviewers have used about him than his books themselves. His previous collections have tilted on an axis of religious belief and philosophy: he writes that our investment and belief when we read fiction is a metaphorical substitute for religious faith because it

If you go down to the British Library today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Because as of last weekend, it’s archiving not just every book published in the UK (its traditional role), not just every e-book published in the UK – it’s archiving every website based in the UK. In terms of what we’ve conventionally understood by the word ‘library’, it’s as big a change as there has ever been. ‘Capturing the nation’s digital memory’ – that’s the phrase the British Library themselves are using about the venture. Your first response might be: ‘the internet archives itself, doesn’t it? It’s called Google.’ But as Lucie Burgess, the library’s Head

While Ian McEwan’s recent piece in the Guardian is not expressly termed a treatise on the value of art, it is hard to see it otherwise. What is the use of fiction, what can a novelist tell us of, ‘why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles…?’ he asks. At the heart of this modern day ‘defense of poesy’ is McEwan’s devotion to realism: it is realism that falls last to ‘the icy waters of scepticism’ and it is realism that saves him from it. He gives an account of how his thirteen year-old self, so overcome by the description of the 1900

Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is set in the suburban streets of south Dublin in 1984. The story is narrated by Jim Finnegan: an innocent 13-year-old boy who lives in a carefree world that consists of hanging out in the local park and going on nightly bike rides with his geeky friend Gary. But shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Jim’s life drastically changes when he falls in love with a beautiful 18-year-old woman, Saidhbh Donoghue. After a brief honeymoon period their relationship turns sour when the young couple are forced to take a boat to Britain to arrange for Saidhbh to have an abortion. Both Jim and Saidhbh decide

This post is the second half of a list of 21 books that a man might give to his godson on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday.That is novels done. The bespoke bookcase is more than half loaded; 12 slots are full, nine remain. I conceive the selection of other titles as a complement to the novels we have already chosen – an acknowledgement too, if you like, that the novel is the highest of all art, let alone book, forms and other texts should therefore pay homage to it. Having ended prose fiction with a novel that pretended to be a long poem we will now begin the best

There is much to be said for godfathers. They offer the wisdom of maturity without the complications of direct filial ties. Likewise there is much to be said for 21st birthday celebrations, the last relic in our ossified, post-industrial society of the adulthood rituals of traditional peoples. However, it is the fusion of these two noble quantities that gives the most pleasing outcome. The godfather’s 21st birthday present to his godson marks a notable point in the annals of gift giving, unmatched since the general demise of dowries and Danegeld.  The occasion suggests gifts with an Edwardian tone, badger hair and ivory shaving tackle or rawhide hand luggage; stout apparatus

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art? Luckily, there

– Hong Kong  Imagine if every British novel published since the 1940s was about the Second World War. That’s about as accurate a view of contemporary China held by readers in the Anglophone West, say experts here. On the eve of this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize announcement, it’s worth considering why that’s still the case. The prize celebrates Asian literature written in, or translated into, English. While eligible authors span the continent from Japan to Iran, all previous winners have come from East Asia, and three out of those five from China. Harvey Thomlinson, a Hong Kong-based publisher, also had a mission to highlight quality Chinese literature in English

The first time you run out of space for your books is a rite of passage for booklovers. It’s the moment that you realise the extent of your addiction to these papery worlds. It’s also a time of anxiously wondering what on earth you’ll do with all the books you have yet to accumulate. Double stacking, piles on the floor, and visits to the charity shop are really just temporary measures; the only satisfactory solution is to get a new bookcase. Ikea has just released colourful limited editions of their Billy bookcases – thrilling news for spatially challenged booklovers. There are three new styles of this bestselling piece of Ikea

Last year I wrote an unpatriotic column for the Observer. I said that while American literary and journalistic frauds tended to be simple men, who lied and plagiarised to boast their reputations and earnings, British frauds were as a rule darker and nastier. The first piece of evidence was Johann Hari – whose exposure caused the greatest scandal my small world of “broadsheet” journalism had seen in years. Hari did not confine himself to making up quotes and facts to enhance his career. Night after night, he went on Wikipedia and defamed his many enemies under a variety of pseudonyms – I should declare an interest and state that I

Byron may have been mad, bad and dangerous to know, but how’s your knowledge of the rest of the Young Romantics? Are you a connoisseur of Keats, or a specialist on Shelley? Take this light-hearted quiz to find out how much you really know about this dazzling generation of English poets. There are four possible answers to the questions below, and one of them relates to Byron, Keats or Shelley. There’s a point for every correct answer, and some bonus points to be won as well, if you can spot a few Romantic red herrings I’ve hidden in here too… Answers should be emailed to dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk. The winner will receive a

The confirmation that bones found beneath a Leicester car park are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those of Richard III has launched a deluge of familiar puns. ‘A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!’ say numerous wags on Twitter. I wonder if Richard III would be remembered so widely today were it not for Shakespeare. The character of the play, who speaks some of the most famous lines in English, is descended from the portrait drawn by Sir Thomas More in an uncompleted history written at various points throughout the 1510s. Many historians argue that More wrote the book to please the Tudors. This is, it is said, why he drew on the work of Polydore Vergil,

It’s Friday at 10am in a remote field in Fife. John Burnside is taking his morning walk, whilst simultaneously attempting to conduct a conversation with me down a dodgy telephone line. Within seconds he’s speaking about a concept of happiness— or lack of it— that goes back to philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. ‘I’m in the middle of a remote country hill in Scotland, so the reception is not really that good, especially in bad weather like this,’ he tells me, fading in and out of coherence. As he begins to walk over to his house— and the reception gets slighty better— I’m beginning to picture an idylic, lush,