Ian Thomson

At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt

In 1882, while on a lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde was surprised to find a copy of The Divine Comedy in a Nebraskan penitentiary. ‘Oh dear, who would have thought of finding Dante here?’ he marvelled. No doubt the inmates were supposed to be edified by Dante’s medieval epic of sin and salvation: ghastly

With almost 30 novels to his name, Graham Greene was a prolific chronicler of human faith and wretchedness. A writer of his stature requires a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Greene had found him in Norman Sherry, a Joseph Conrad expert based in Texas. Sherry set to work in 1976,

Born in New Orleans in 1924, Truman Capote wrote his first fiction at the age of eight. Or so he claimed. Rarely has a writer so elaborated his own legend; not only could Capote make the wildest nonsense about himself credible, he encouraged others to add to it. Drink was no doubt partly to blame.

Public visits to the sewers of Vienna are rare: the clammy atmosphere can cause breathing problems. Nevertheless in 1994 I visited them with a local Graham Greene enthusiast, Brigitte Timmer- mann. Greene’s darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the Vienna sewers and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. With

When Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, Italians were filled with jingoist pride. The dictator triumphantly announced the conquest of the promised sub-Saharan kingdom. ‘He’s like a god,’ marvelled one Fascist. ‘Like a god?’ returned another. ‘He is a god.’ Mussolini was part demagogue, part buffoon; on occasion he wore a tasselled fez

Lucrezia Borgia was not the fiend history made her out to be. According to Gaia Servadio, she was a radiant symbol of Renaissance woman and, moreover, a judicious administrator of her husband the Duke of Ferrara’s realm. Lucrezia’s ethereal blonde looks had so captivated Lord Byron that, in 1816, he stole a strand of her

Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is

In the 16th century Montaigne voiced the fear that missionary endeavour — the white man’s ‘contagion’ — would hasten the ruin of the New World. Though Jesuits played their part in the spoliation of the Americas, only the most romantic could claim that Indian tribes there lived in a state of prelapsarian grace, so artless,

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, even prolix writer, with more than 50 novels and short-story collections to her name. Yet she writes wonderfully of life’s uncertainties and of American reality in the raw. In her latest novel, I’ll Take You There, Oates returns to her old themes of violence, madness and sexual passion. The