Elite misbehaviour is the Ariadne’s thread, the unifying theme, running through Alan Hollinghurst’s oeuvre. From his debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, to his latest work, Our Evenings, his characters tend to be entitled toffs — or bourgeois parvenus with a …
Michel Houellebecq is literature’s Lucifer
According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What …
Sally Rooney’s therapy trap
If you’ve ever had the curious pleasure of reading a Sally Rooney novel, you may guess what you’re in for with Intermezzo. There will be endless intimate descriptions of the psychology and behaviour of her characters; sex scenes full of …
Why feminists love to hate Sally Rooney
“Lying naked with her chin in her hand, reading poetry.” Jesus, here we go. I feel my hackles rise as I’m thrown into an arena where it’s me versus an imaginary other reader, who I needn’t bother describing, who likes …
How to read like a man
A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as …
How vanilla is your sexual fantasy?
If you are a child of the Seventies or Eighties, chances are that your formative sexual education was considerably influenced by rifling furtively through a Nancy Friday book. Even today, thanks to well-thumbed titles like My Secret Garden and Forbidden …
The worst novelist in the world
Budding novelists are always instructed to start their books in an arresting fashion. L.P. Hartley knew exactly what he was doing in The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” As did Anthony Burgess …
Is Trump a perverted Emersonian?
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light
which flashes across his mind from within, more than the
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses
without notice his thought, because it is …
Joan Didion’s insufferable disciples
Joan Didion’s enduring popularity among today’s young readers is a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. So many visibly progressive, literary types seem to uncritically worship her. Really? I always think to myself, concerned that I’ve misheard them. Joan Didion, the National Review …
Why I quit as a school librarian
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided to quit my post as an assistant librarian at a private school, but it was most probably when Andersen Press defended its decision to publish a book intended for under-sevens that contained …
Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire
Pale Fire is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It is so great it is terrifying to write about. This is not something I would normally confess, but in this case it seems better to just come out …
The Met Gala is a Ballardian nightmare
For weeks now, a timer on the Vogue website has been ticking off the seconds, the anticipation within the fashion world bursting at the seams. But finally: the 2024 Met Gala is here.
There is, however, something different about this …
How to survive the Tory apocalypse
When Ford Madox Ford died in June 1939, a few weeks before Europe compelled itself once again to go to war, only three people turned up to his funeral. In an obituary, Graham Greene compared his fellow writer’s passing to …
PEN America has surrendered over Israel
Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, on the heels of also cancelling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors …
The problem with Byron’s debauchery
In 1798, a lame, rough-mannered 10-year-old boy from Aberdeen called George Gordon Byron inherited a peerage, along with an abbey in Nottinghamshire, and grew up to be one of the most notorious Romantic poets of all time. He died two …