Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies
remains are handled in a culturally sensitive and religiously appropriate manner presence without value is perceived as occupation today we have commonality of parts void between lethality and inaction marketing ability in current-trend perception
Gide wrote to Simenon: ‘You are living on a false reputation — just like Baudelaire and Chopin. … You are much more important than is commonly supposed.’ Something of the kind could, I feel, be said about Francis King (1923–2011), who was prolific, like Simenon (his last book, Cold Snap published in 2009 was his
The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard
George Kennan, the career diplomat and historian best known for his sensible suggestion that the United States try to resist the Soviet Union ‘without recourse to any general military conflict’, is much in vogue these days, at least in Washington, where Senator Rand Paul is presenting Kennan’s theory of ‘containment’ as an alternative to George
I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of the sort, and I feel ashamed, because, although it’s smartly, smoothly written, my pleasure was partly based on titillation. I smirked — I occasionally snickered — at the madder facts of self-mortification, whereby in the
You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend more on advertising than small ones. Maria Sharapova is attractive. Given that the book is written in the dullest of academic prose, there may even have been a paragraph I missed about how there is
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than his excellent Logan McRae series. Set in a fictional Scottish city where a miasma of corruption oozes out of the very stones, most of its characters are sadistic, victimised or both. The narrator, Ash Henderson,
A preview of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists issue in April last year, the decennial list identifying 20 writers under 40 as the names to watch. The previous four novels of the Nigerian-born Oyeyemi (who was first published at the age of 18) revolve around deeply psychological
What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory at El Alamein. As the author of this brisk study of one of its more admired practitioners writes: In no particular order, the following were casualties [i.e. sacked]: Wavell, Cunningham, Auchinleck, Norrie, Ritchie, Lumsden, Gatehouse,
The intensely lyrical Ghost Moth is set in Belfast in 1969, as the Troubles begin and when Katherine, housewife and mother of four, finds herself remembering an old love affair. Michèle Forbes achieves a vivid depiction of family life — the daily squabbles and teasing, the nuances of Katherine’s love for her children through a
If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity. At the
I first mistook David Gilbert’s second novel for the sort of corduroy-sleeved family saga at which American writers excel. The main character, Dyer, is an elderly author gathering his sons about him in Manhattan after the funeral of a boyhood friend, Charles. There’s Richard, a Hollywood screen hack whose teenage journal Dyer lifted for a
‘On the night of 15 April 1897, a small, elegant steamer is en route from Egypt’s Port Said to Jaffa.’ ‘At the end of October 1898 the small steamer Rossiya made its way from Alexandria in Egypt, via Port Said, to Jaffa.’ It is unusual, or maybe even unique, for the first chapters of two
The actor David Niven was once badgered by the American columnist William F. Buckley to introduce him to Marc Chagall, a neighbour of Niven’s in Switzerland. Buckley, a keen amateur painter, wanted to know what Chagall thought of his work. With grave misgivings, Niven agreed to set up a meeting. Chagall in silence gazed at
This long orchestral piece records a day the composer spent one summer meditating in Dibnah’s yard on the sounds of dereliction, or possibly the dereliction of sound: the settlement of rust, the flake and drift toward the earth of forged and hammered things, the creak of shiny flanges in the wind, and the occasional crash
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to its title. It’s the name of an online game, set in Jack the Ripper’s London. Six players — five teenagers and an elderly man — inhabit their personas with fanatical fervour. They switch their forensic
About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well, not the actual end, to the acknowledgements (always fascinating) and after them a very handy ‘Q & A with Nathan Filer’. And there I found the key I needed. As part of a creative writing
When John Buchan was appointed Governor General of Canada in 1935, the country was deep in depression, the western provinces a dustbowl and a quarter of a million people on public relief, while the prospect of war in Europe threatened great stresses in a newly independent country and its relations with Britain. Many or even
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken by the hand and is being gently led down a path by a guide who can be trusted to point out interesting landmarks, allow the odd meander, but always keep firmly on course. Mark Gevisser,
