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 …
The metaverse of Fernando Pessoa
At the beginning of this year, I visited Lisbon for the first time, and thought I’d enhance the experience by reading some books set in Portugal’s capital. First, I read Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo …
This book will send you to Hell
Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
Why chicks still dig Byronic heroes
Two centuries after his death, Byron is still — like Madonna, Napoleon and Chewbacca — a member of the one-name-only club, even if he’s forced to share it with a hamburger chain. At the time, his death at the age …
Britain doesn’t need a sick king
If we were living in the world of mythology, King Charles’s cancer might have some dire consequences. It’s possible that the entire economy would collapse, famine would kill off millions of citizens and those who survived might perish of plague. …
Why I imagined my husband’s death
In my new novel, A Book of Days, a husband is dying slowly. While I was writing it, my own husband died suddenly, with no warning. He died in his sleep, I was told. His children and I hope that …
The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz
The most-told joke about Auschwitz surfaces in different forms. As I first heard it while a teenager in “north London” — not just a cluster of adjacent postcodes, of course, but shorthand for a mindset that one kind of pundit …
ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius
You have to salute the brass balls of the Japanese literary novelist Rie Kudan. She was accepting one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards, the Akutagawa Prize. The judges were hosing her new novel, The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy, down …
Why women love lesbian romance
If you’re the fastidious sort who cares about historical accuracy, then you probably aren’t the right audience for Don’t Want You Like A Best Friend. Billed as “a swoon-worthy debut queer Victorian romance”, US author Emma Alban brings us the …
Confessions of a Country Parson
I spent the first week of January in the parish of Weston Longville, Norfolk, in the company of the Revd James Woodforde. The year is 1776, or 1784, or 1801. No matter. The year is not important, because each year …
The labyrinth of Guy Davenport’s mind
Born nearly a century ago, Guy Davenport was unclassifiable. Was he a poet or a polymath? An artist or an eccentric philosopher? As a new collection of his essays is published, John Jeremiah Sullivan recalls his laughter, tears and wit……
WG Sebald’s cure for trauma
Over several recent weeks, as November turned to December and autumn to winter, I spent the first hour of each day reading W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. I read slowly, and when I looked up from the page I could see, …
PG Wodehouse scoffed at politics
A certain kind of reader is unlikely to accept any kind of argument for P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. Set in a private, all-boys school, the novel features a main character, the Mike of the title, with few distinguishing traits beyond …
George Santos is no Gatsby
Who is the real George Santos? Even assuming you’ve already read a lot about the Brazilian-American Republican politician, you’re unlikely to know the answer — for it seems he barely knows, either. This is a man who has claimed to …