Ian Sansom

This, in my experience, has been completely unprecedented, and I doubt will ever happen again: three members of the same family reading the same book at the same time. We had to read the book in shifts: it was like waiting on the docks to hear the plight of Little Nell, or gathering together to

Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday;

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its

Nothing much to report here, no news and no surprises: dog bites man; Philip Roth writes another masterpiece. What would be truly shocking at this stage in the late, great unfolding of Roth’s genius would be if he were to write a bad book, something as bad as The Breast, his last bad book, and