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, Point Blanc and Scorpia; lesser spotted were the Diamond Brothers books, in which Horowitz indulges a love of classic noir and black comedy. I worked my way through the punning titles – The Falcon’s Malteser, South By South East, The French Confection – and last w ..read more

“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 keynote of Between Meals, the memoirs of a journalist-hedonist known mostly, if known at all, for his columns in the New Yorker. Image credit: Penguin Liebling’s Eden is 1920s Paris, but as his commentator notes, the usual suspects fail to materialize. There i ..read more

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 his journey – which is literal as well as literary – in the Po delta, thence heading upstream to the source, a decision born of his professed “reluctance to go with the flow”. But he is walking, cycling, occasionally canoeing; the one who feels like they are swimming against ..read more

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 his journey – which is literal as well as literary – in the Po delta, thence heading upstream to the source, a decision born of his professed “reluctance to go with the flow”. But he is walking, cycling, occasionally canoeing; the one who feels like they are swimming against ..read more

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 in question. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) had made ripples, but Poems (1920) had sunk beneath imputations of coldness, heartlessness, and the general idea that its author was not so much a poet as a satirist. Prufrock had been published in a run of a mere 500 copies; Po ..read more

‘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 is easily settled by a bare minimum of research. Cashel Ross did not exist; nor, probably, did ‘W.B.’ actually sign off his preface from the same city in which Joyce finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – ‘Trieste | February 2022’. The play’s the thing. Image credit: Penguin ..read more

“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 detective novel; it’s a crime novel, in which the characters converge on the nexus of their fates. Image credit: Faber This is my fifth Banville but my first Banville thriller. The man himself used to be frightfully coy about his genre fiction, churning ou ..read more

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 Lee had to get out of. And the Guardian’s words on the front cover – “tender and elegant” – read less like a ringing endorsement than a stifled yawn. A good thing, then, that A Month in the Country speaks for itself, unlike the Booker-shortlisted ephemera that actually need a volley of press quotes. Ima ..read more

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 these novels, their characters just too agency-less to engage with. (When Nabokov described his characters as “galley slaves”, he could just as easily have been referring to Spark’s.) It’s not a good hit rate when I put it like that: 50%. So why do I keep returning to Spark? We ..read more

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 talk about Camp is…to betray it”. Hence her “Notes” are precisely that: nothing so grand as an essay, just 58 bullet points, most of them no longer than a paragraph or two. Image credit: Penguin Sontag starts with the premise that Camp stresses artifice and s ..read more