In the Current Issue: Ritchie Robertson on W G Sebald * Francis Beckett on miners * Theo Zenou on the Pope * John Adamson on the Civil War * Norma Clarke on pink * Nicholas Rankin on Norman Lewis * Michael Burleigh on Huawei * Robert Gerwarth on the Kaiser's collaboration * Pratinav Anil on missionaries and Mughals * Bijan Omrani on Mesopotamia * Miranda Seymour on the Romanovs * Jason Burke ...

Book Reviews by Stephen Smith From the December 2024 Issue Lines of Insight Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute By Nicholas Fox Weber

David Nicholls is celebrated as the outstanding exponent of the variant of literary romcom known as ‘rom-trag’. Fifteen years after its publication, his masterpiece, One Day, newly adapted as a Netflix series, once again features on bestseller lists.The novel follows an on–off couple who meet at university. Nicholls has since rung the changes, turning his attention to adolescent first ...

Rosa Lyster: Kiss of Death - Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. H G Wells and Rebecca West are standing in front of a bookcase, talking frantically at each other about matters of literary style, moving closer and closer until they kiss. The physicist Leo Szilard is somewhere near the British Museum, staring down the street and watching the traffic lights change.

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first visit to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell in Kent. He described the house ...

D D Guttenplan: Smiley Redux - Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. In May 1966, an aggrieved John le Carré wrote to the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in response to a critical review.Noting that his books were at that point unavailable in the Soviet Union, he set out his stall for the benefit of (sadly imaginary) Russian …

Dec 1, 2024 · Whither the literary salon? Once there was the Viennese coffeehouse, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots; now we have Starbucks and Twitter. The setting of Mark Bowles’s intelligent debut novel is poised between these two poles. Café Amato is the favoured spot of Henry Nash, middle-aged academic ...

In 1789, as the revolution tore French society apart, a unique book was published in Britain. It consisted mainly of letters written by a Hampshire parson to a pair of well-known naturalists. These letters were filled with observations relating to …

The protagonists in Salley Vickers’s novels tend to be either artists or in some way transformed by works of art. Her debut, Miss Garnet’s Angel (2000), centres on a series of paintings featuring the Archangel Raphael that Miss Garnet stumbles across in a Venetian church. In Vickers’s 2018 novel The Librarian, the main character is a champion of children’s literature.

How is a totalitarian state like a love affair? They both leave archives behind when they go. How is a totalitarian state like a bad love affair? The archive that survives the end of each is a monument to abuse, surveillance and betrayal. This equivalence is indirectly evoked in …