The semiotics of clothes, especially royal ones, can be fascinating, sending out powerful messages. Think of the jewel-studded, pearl-strewn portraits of Queen Elizabeth I or Princess Diana’s revenge-chic black dress. As a fashion queen herself (Justine Picardie was editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar for more than seven years and has an acclaimed book on Chanel under
Can Xue is an oddity in the landscape of world literature. Greeted mostly with bewilderment or indifference in her native China, her novels have gained a following among a certain type of erudite western reader over the past few decades, leading to an annual flurry of Nobel speculation and more works in English translation than
I think I’d be pretty hostile if I met my doppelganger – living proof of my mediocrity. My fragile ego even balks at being told I’m reminiscent of someone else. But, drawn as they are to the uncanny, authors just love doppelgangers. In As If, Isabel Waidner makes a playful contribution to the literary tradition,
To our jaded century, ‘fairy’ carries connotations ranging from the sentimental to the sickly. It conjures childishness, foolishness, insipidity and softness – Tinker Bell, the Tooth Fairy, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, cakes, twinkling lights and a certain brand of soap. Francis Young feels that the word should also be applied to
The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and
Whether you went with the two big rugby goalposts, those opposing H’s of Heaney and Hughes, or with Blake Morrison’s quondam super league of world English (or sometimes airport) poets, Brodsky, Walcott, Murray and Heaney, Heaney loomed amiably in the poetry landscape of the late 20th century. I knew him a little and liked him
What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on
Tony Abbott’s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend and foe alike. We don’t expect such narrative command from a former prime minister of Australia. In office, Abbott was a believer in the ‘lean and lift’ principle of civic life, with a marked preference for the
In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow
‘Pinball games, with their flashing lights and unforgettable names, are the one thread that runs together my otherwise fragmentary life.’ So writes Andreas Bernard in the last sentence of this touchingly Proustian memoir. He hymns a life spent flipping small steel balls up and down machines which, despite their clamorous lights, bleeps and honks, amounted
We all know that an Englishman’s home is his castle, or at least it was. Looking back, it is easy to see how the castle walls were breached – first by mobile phones and wifi, then by the smart speakers and other gadgets that help and also harvest us. The idea that our homes are
Lionel Shriver is a first-rate storyteller. And yet… A Better Life is a satire on the immigration problem that particularly faces the US. All the clichéd arguments on both sides of the debate are laid bare. In fact, the whole novel is a cliché. Yet clichés come into existence because their substance is what everyone
Japanophiles, look away now. A country renowned for inspiring fascination, warm feelings and not a little envy in its rapidly rising numbers of visitors – from crime-free streets to clean and plentiful public toilets – is in the grip of problems deeper and darker than you might imagine. The classic Japan itinerary reveals little of
If it is true that a serious artist is one with the capacity to go on reinventing who they are in their work, Leonard Cohen unquestionably counts as serious. Not that anyone is likely to think of him as frivolous, exactly. While the famously acid description of his songs as ‘music to slit your wrists
‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of this extraordinary coming-of-age story. And: ‘If your parents are missionaries, it changes everything… They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.’
This is a book that many of us might like to have on our coffee tables – beautifully produced, not too heavy and full of pictures of pretty ladies, many of them with no clothes on. Its purpose is to show not only how artists have viewed the female body from the Renaissance to the
Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts, embodied the Schopenhauerian creed that to be human is to suffer. His latest, White River Crossing, is no different. Canada, 1766. A pedlar appears at Prince of Wales Fort, a Hudson Bay Company trading post
From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. In Discord, Jeremy Cooper’s eighth novel, Rebekah Rosen goes a step further, seeking inspiration not in nature itself but in a wartime diary chronicling the annual crops on a Peckham allotment. She intends to use
A familiar defence of Anglicanism holds that flowers of principle bloomed in the mucky soil of compromise. Yes, this idea runs, the Church of England that evolved from Henry VIII’s marital strife was indeed a theological hotchpotch; but there is nevertheless much to be said for a tolerant strand of Christianity forming a middle way
On the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, there is a two-storey factory churning out a vast number of dollar bills every day for the United States Federal Reserve. When Oliver Bullough visited, he counted 129 pallets in one room, collectively containing more than $4 billion. He also watched a woman use a jack to casually