D.J. Taylor is a critic, novelist and biographer of William Thackeray and George Orwell.
From our UK edition
Like its predecessor My Phantoms (2021), Gwendoline Riley’s new novel is stuffed to the gills with the sort of people she has come to specialise in – who, once assembled, supply a kind of casebook of rebarbativeness. To begin with there are the terrible men: – the thespian, Lawrence, for example, who says things like
It was the British political journalist Jason Cowley, writing in London’s Sunday Times a month or two back, who posed a query calculated to strike terror into the heart of any self-respecting Orwell-fancier. Were we, Cowley wondered, with the air of one who tosses a Sèvres vase into the air to watch it descend into
No doubt much of this has to do with the question of her upbringing
From our UK edition
The job of radio critic for the Tablet offers several perquisites. One of them is access to the BBC previews website, and it was by this means, quite some time before its recent broadcast, that I was able to listen to Adrian Chiles’s Radio 4 documentary Finding Elgar. As a veteran of countless BBC radio
From our UK edition
Although Gordon M. Williams died as recently as 2017, his heyday was the Wilson/Heath era of the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time he managed to appear on the inaugural Booker shortlist, dash off a ten-day potboiler, The Siege of Trenchard’s Farm, that would be filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and continue to file a
From our UK edition
A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows,
From our UK edition
‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As
Half a century on, how does E.L. Doctorow’s great American novel fare?
Susan Morrison’s book sets itself two tasks: where did its hero come from? And why is he so good at what he does?
From our UK edition
A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he (and it’s always a ‘he’) regularly appears. Here you will discover that to contemplate Manchester City’s mid-season loss of form is ‘like sitting in Rome in 410 and watching the Visigoths pour over the horizon’,
The novel is as much a historical artifact as a work of fiction
From our UK edition
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There
One of The Haunted Wood’s great strengths is Sam Leith’s awareness of just how important children’s literature is
Daniel de Visé’s entertaining — if that is the right word — canter through Belushi and Aykroyd’s lives and times covers a fair number of bases
From our UK edition
Eric Blair, to give George Orwell his baptismal name, arrived in Burma (present-day Myanmar) as a 19-year-old trainee police officer at the end of 1922 and left it in mid-1927 just before his 24th birthday. Not much of his time there had a direct impact on his work beyond a solitary novel, Burmese Days (1934),
The writer was one of the great underrated chroniclers of ’the valley of the shadow of books’
While I expected the le Carré who emerges from it to be a womanizer, a fantasist and a self-server, I didn’t anticipate that he would be such a terrible bore
Richard Russo doesn’t do fireworks. Dazzling metaphorical flights are not his thing
The legendary British author’s attitude to the US is curiously double-edged
Sunday Best: 80 Great Books from a Lifetime of Reviews by John Carey reviewed
