Books
Boyd Tonkin
Inevitably, the story begins and (almost) ends with Las Meninas. Inspired by the art and life of Diego Velázquez, Amy Sackville tops and tails her third novel with his endlessly enigmatic group portrait from 1656. It shows the Spanish royal household, their dwarves, a mastiff, a perplexing reflection of the King and Queen in a mirror – and the court painter himself, trapped forever in this nest of “sometimes impossible frames”. The painting ensnares us in a hall of mirrors, a labyrinth of gazes. Like a half-opened door into the mysteries of perception, Las Meninas has invited a host of Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red Lion Square and Grosvenor Square, where Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were the leading lights, demonstrating against Vietnam; Paris, where student protests, strikes and sit-ins quickly spread across the country, and General de Gaulle fled briefly to Germany; the riots across the United States that followed Martin Luther King's death, and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago; and of course the Prague Spring, so brutally snuffed out by Soviet tanks. I was a student in the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
When it came out in 1993, Trainspotting was probably the most shocking novel since Lady Chatterley's Lover. It’s rumoured to have missed out on a Booker shortlisting because it offended the judges. Certainly, for your reviewer, a Surrey teenager at the time, its savage crackling humour and eye-popping junkie melodrama was the stuff of gleeful fantasy, especially when canonical comic fiction generally meant Jane Austen. However, a quarter-century on, Dead Men’s Trousers is the sixth novel to tell the story of (some of) the principal Trainspotting quartet of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud Read more ...
Michael Arditti
From the myths of the Old Testament to the miracles of the New, the Bible has been as much a source of inspiration to writers, artists and composers as it has to theologians and priests. One of the most infamous yet influential of all Old Testament myths is that of the Destruction of Sodom, which has inspired writers from the Earl of Rochester to Proust, painters from Dürer to Turner, and film-makers from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Robert Aldrich.It has also been a source of untold misery as the justification for homophobia in Judaism and Christianity and, through its retelling in the Qur’an, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For as long as I can remember, and long before I set foot in America for the first time at age 24, I have been intrigued by America – the “idea” of it, conjured up through music, and, as it turned out, the reality – and the common language which (depending on your point of view) binds us, or separates us. I’ve spent time in 10 of its major cities and, over the last three years, a great deal of time in New York where my (crazy to many British friends) proposal for an arts festival was welcomed, as was I – and by officials whose London equivalents would probably not have granted me the time of Read more ...
mark.kidel
All the great sociologists, in the tradition of Georg Simmel, Max Weber and others, are on a mission. They cannot help wishing to change the world. Science should be value-free, but the social sciences have never come close to that questionable ideal. All science is a human endeavour, indeed always one rooted in society. There is no position, theoretical or descriptive, that will or cannot change, or that isn’t subject to paradigm or point-of-view, perspectives that are rooted in time and place.Richard Sennett, while always trying to be fair and open-minded, in tune with his political Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life. The ranks of the natives, as well as the city’s other cultural immigrants – the French have an uncanny skill at adopting those they wish to – have proved no less fascinating.In Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 Agnès Poirier has chosen an unusual decade on which to concentrate. This is a truly Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive history may have missed some nuts out. Not that anyone would question the sanity of a deserter from the US Army in 1968. Seen on the ground and from the air, the hot front of the Cold War was no place to be.Thus a group of four daring pioneers shucked their uniforms while on leave in Japan, and made their way via a fishing vessel to the eastern shore of the Soviet landmass, across which they were ceremonially paraded as propaganda Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen was – as deft in dissecting the economics of romance as in laying bare the lies told by the human heart – for better or worse, she still sent all her heroines down the aisle. Ann Jemima Provis, the ingenious, wicked-humoured 17-year-old who found herself at the heart of the scandal that dominates my novel The Optickal Illusion, was a genuine historic figure who might even have crossed paths with Austen in London in the 1790s. Yet she wanted more than marriage, and in her fight to win a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
All this time La Mer had been brewing. It was almost a year since Debussy had written to Colonne tentatively offering him “some orchestral pieces” he was working on, and to his publisher, Jacques Durand, a fortnight later listing the titles of the three movements: “Mer belle aux îles sanguinaires,” “Jeux de vagues,” and “Le vent fait danser la Mer.” But thereafter the trail goes dead until July 1904, when he writes to Lilly from Paris expressing the (no doubt hypocritical) hope that “La Mer will be so kind as to release me so as to be with you by the 15th August,” though by the end of the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Rhidian Brook
When I was 23 I had a job selling butterflies in glass cases in America. I worked for a guy who, as well as being a butterfly salesman, had ambitions to be America’s first Pope (an ambition he ditched on account of him wanting to marry). I drove all over the US and sold in 32 states. It was 1987 and was pre-internet and pre-mobile phone, which increased the sensation of having an adventure in a land far, far away. I was not a novelist at the time but I told myself that I had to write about these butterflying days if I could. And so I did – 30 years later.I actually made a start in 1991 (I Read more ...