Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series landed among the late millennials like a drop pod of Space Marines, which we were all collecting. They were, to quote Blackadder, full of capture, torture, escape, and back home in time for tea and medals. Even the cool kids at my school, the casual, uncommitted bullies, were reading Stormbreaker,…
“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms”, wrote A. J. Liebling (1904-63), “the fantasy of a Mr Have-your-cake-and-eat-it”. (Liebling, the reader soon learns, always chose to eat it rather than have it). “No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane.” This is the…
It’s curious that Italy’s longest river should have such a short name, especially in a country enamoured of long words. But then, length only says so much. Tobias Jones’ The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River is not a particularly long book, but, like its subject, it is capacious, voluminous, and sluggish. Jones starts…
Ted Hughes said “Each year Eliot’s presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble”. So it’s strange to learn in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem that Eliot’s presence was very minor indeed before the publication of the poem…
‘This is a true story’, The Romantic all but begins. It is based, supposedly, on the incomplete biography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799-1882), which William Boyd is meant to have obtained a few years ago and which peppers the novel’s sporadic footnotes. The reader is part of a game from the outset, but one that…
“Terry Tice liked killing people”, begins John Banville’s nineteenth novel: “it was a matter of making things tidy…he had nothing personal against any of his targets…except insofar as they were clutter.” In a certain sense, Banville knows whereof he writes: April in Spain is a clutter-free giallo, utterly filleted of red herrings. It’s not a…
I’ve seen the film. I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book but for learning that J. L. Carr died the very day I was born. The title doesn’t do it any favours, I think: ‘A Month in the Country’ calls up Georgian images of greenwood trees and dusty parsons, the complacent England that Laurie…
As with real sparks, Muriel Spark’s novels only sometimes catch alight for me. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) caught, Loitering with Intent (1981) too, but The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) didn’t take at all, Spark’s famously firm narrative grip seeming firm to the point of inertia in…
This is not so much a review as some notes on the Notes: “Footnotes on ‘Camp’”, I should really call it. Note the punctuation in the title: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks”, notes Sontag. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”. The inverted commas capture Camp’s fugitive nature, for “to…
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay called ‘To Criticise the Critic.’ Michael Henderson surely considered calling his book To Criticise the Cricket, but then he would have been limited to talking about cricket. That Will Be England Gone – a title cribbed from another poet, Philip Larkin – is a book with little concept of…
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