D.J. Taylor is a critic, novelist and biographer of William Thackeray and George Orwell.
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Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at
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There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as ‘Whiskers’. Philip Larkin’s letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his ‘darling bun’
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Sitting down to inspect the final volume of Pierre Coustillas’s monumental trilogy, I decided to start by counting the number of titles by or about George Gissing (1857–1903) that gleamed from the bookshelf hard by. There were 45 of them. Next, I decided to count the number of these items with which Professor Coustillas was
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Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me Edith.’ I experienced similar misgivings on the occasion, some years ago, that Lady Violet Powell suggested that I might like to call her ‘Violet’. It was not that Lady Violet — Violet — made the
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The contending versions of T.S. Eliot on display in the latest bumper instalment of his collected letters are practically legion. To begin with there is the hieratic, if not downright priestly, Eliot, soberly petitioning Father D’Arcy, the correspondence columns of the Church Times, or studious clergymen who may be flattered into taking charge of his
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Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of
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I am just old enough to remember the terrific fuss that was made about the first Scots literary renaissance when it kicked into gear in the early 1980s. Inaugurated by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), whipped up into a movement by Gray, Agnes Owens and James Kelman’s Lean Tales (1985), and sent on a downward spiral
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The Forgotten Waltz is one of those densely recapitulative novels that seek to interpret emotional crack-up from the angle of its ground-down aftermath. At the same time, it is not really a book about hindsight. Sometimes extending information to the reader and sometimes deliberately covering its tracks, sometimes inviting sympathy for its characters and sometimes
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Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago,
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The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay. The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay. The bloom of youth barely had time to settle before it was overrun by maggots. Thus, coolly appraising his mistress’s somewhat
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Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread of black-and-white photographs, part of an ‘investigator’s report’ into a fatal collision said to have taken place on a Birmingham dual carriageway in the summer of 1996. Unusually for a work of fiction, Tim Pears’ new novel opens with a spread
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Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Having
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One could easily get lost in Jerusalem’s myriad compartments. To begin with there is Preston Pinner, CEO of ‘AuthencityTM’, otherwise known as the ‘hip hub’, a ‘contemporary cultural consulting and production house’ deviously at work to manipulate consumer tastes. Then there is Preston’s father, David, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing junior minister about to depart to ‘Zambabwia’,
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It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand,
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Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far
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No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man
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Anthony Powell always maintained that readers who disliked his early books did so on essentially non-literary grounds. Conservative reviewers of the 1930s, irked by the party-going degenerates of a novel like Afternoon Men (1931) did not believe that such people existed. If, on the other hand, they did exist then novels ought not to be
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Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman
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An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man
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Much of The Painter of Battles takes place in a crumbling watchtower on the Spanish coast, its silence broken only by the respectful commentary issuing from the daily tourist boat. Here on the circular wall of the tower a veteran war photographer, Faulques, is painting a gigantic mural on the theme of conflict through the