A note from Gboyega Odubanjo’s family at the end of Adam, his posthumously published collection, testifies to the loving efforts of communities – family, friends, editors and other writers – in ...
In 1949, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote an essay in which he claimed the ‘marvellous real’ as the ‘heritage’ of all Latin America. Dismissing the European Surrealists as fakers – ‘dream ...
In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...
No one who was in Paris on 7 January 2015 will ever forget the fear and horror that coursed through the entire city that day. This was the date of the massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine ...
What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...
It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...
The modesty of John Burrow’s title, preferring as it rightly does the indefinite to the definite article, is reflected in the attractive and becoming modesty with which he undertakes an unprecedented ...
On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...
Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.
This stupid, vulgar, fatuous, conceited, half-baked and badly written book will give pleasure to the multitude of Trump haters. Many of these coalesce around the Doonesbury cartoons written by Gary ...
It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...
The late journalist Deborah Orr’s moving memoir of her Lanarkshire childhood is about many things but, unwittingly perhaps, it does demonstrate how extremely difficult it is to describe one’s parents.
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