Looking back, the National Public Radio building in midtown Manhattan felt like the centre of a dying world. I was set to appear on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, where, two days before my 33rd birthday, I would join the …
The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie
It was a most fortuitous shipwreck. The S.S. Politician floundered on rocks near the island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides in February 1941, cutting short its journey from Liverpool to the USA. The hull was breached and the ship …
Who cancelled English folklore?
Sleeping Beauty. Cinderella. Puss-in-Boots. All names with which most of us are familiar. But in Britain, when it comes to our own folk tales, myths and legends, most are long forgotten. Few of us know the names of Woden, Herne …
Bob Dylan has no philosophy
This is something special, obviously. Consider, for a moment, the author’s credentials. Pelé knows a lot about playing football, as does Floyd Mayweather about boxing, but do they have the chops to transfer their instinctive and acquired expertise into the …
John Milton’s free speech crusade
For John Milton, death was not the end of his troubles. He spent his final years blind and disgraced, in continual fear of execution by the state. As a fervent republican who had written tracts defending regicide, the restoration of …
Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man?
In 1999, the director Baz Luhrmann had a novelty hit with “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, a spoken-word litany of whimsical advice for young people: enjoy your youth, keep your old love letters, floss, and so on. The text derived …
Can you read in Scottish?
However indifferent we might have been to our school days, most of us will remember at least one moment of significant connection to a teacher, or a lesson, or a book. I recall my high school teachers as a mixed …
Cormac McCarthy’s irrational apocalypse
“When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible”, warns a character in The Passenger, “even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned …
Jan Morris: prophet of our gender troubles
“Do you remember,” the late Jan Morris asked our late Queen, “when they climbed Everest for the first time, and the news came to you on the day before your coronation?”
It was 2001. The writer and the monarch were …
Annie Ernaux: queen of the suburbs
Think Milton Keynes, with touches of Harlow, Stevenage or Crawley. Its location in relation to the capital, though, plants the town closer to Watford, even Slough. You might just about imagine a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature growing …
How Smiley’s people conquered Britain
John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, was a spy, an absurdly successful English novelist and, we now learn from two new books about him, something of a shit. He is also an author whose work spoke to a particular …
Why artists sell out
“I’m not green-lighting anything I don’t understand,” says Barry Lapidus, a studio executive at Paramount Pictures. “We’re going to stop developing these rarefied flights of fancy and start applying some good business sense to what we do here.”
This dialogue …
Richard Osman’s common people
In 1984, Clive James tabled the Barry Manilow Law: no-one you know likes Barry Manilow, while the rest of the world worships the ground on which he walks. This adage can now be updated. Until very recently, I didn’t know …
In conversation with Philip Roth
Perhaps too much of Philip Roth’s energies were devoted to explaining or defending himself. You could not be with Philip for any period of time before he would enlist you in the agenda of “defending” him — against a plethora …
James Joyce’s divine comedy
One of the great literary anniversaries last year was the death of Dante in 1321, while this year marks the centenary of the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses. At first glance it would be hard to find two more ill-assorted …
