It comes as a surprise for anyone assuming that ghosthunters are easily fooled scaredy cats to learn that there was once a Society for Psychical Research based at Cambridge University. Undergraduate members would gather on Sunday evenings to hear the latest reports of investigations into supernatural phenomena. It sounds quaint; but to judge from Ben
Yarnton, Oxfordshire. A teenage girl is dumped face down in a pit, her legs bent and tethered. Around her lie the crania, jawbones and ribs of several children. Taken alone, this scene of 9th-century carnage puzzles as much as it horrifies. When placed in the wider context of a seemingly universal need to ensure that
Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the
Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho
Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find
Many readers of Dante get no further than the Inferno. The inscription over the gates of Hell, the demon-haunted circles, the howling winds that buffet the lovers Paolo and Francesca, even the poet’s grim profile and bonnet, are part of the world’s literary and artistic heritage. Several translators also stop at the point that the
Is occult knowledge even possible in the age of the internet? If a recondite author obsessed you back in the day, it took hours of fossicking in far-flung dusty bookshops to feed your hunger. Oh, the joys of hunting down a shabby collection of Arthur Machen weirdiana! Now a few keystrokes will do the job.
Tasty meals and epiphanies: that’s what Banana Yoshimoto mostly deals in. It’s no accident that her most famous book is entitled Kitchen. Sometimes the epiphanies come by way of the tasty meals; at other times they are triggered by effects of light playing over rivers, trees, landscapes, as if we had suddenly found ourselves inside
There are other reasons beyond shortage of time (the acclaimed Indian novelist Anita Desai has just turned 87) to write a novella; the genre is as attractive and prestigious as it is fashionable. The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and
If you could resuscitate a hunk from history, who would you choose? The secretive Whitehall ministry in Kaliane Bradley’s striking debut is working on time travel, facilitating the removal of various Brits from their own era to (roughly) ours. The candidates were all due to die anyway, so the risk of altering history is minimal.
Rereading The Adventures of Huckle-berry Finn can be a saddening experience. It’s not just the oft-repeated n-word that jolts, then pains, then twinges; it’s the ‘no sah’, ‘I’s agwyne to’ locutions of Huck’s companion, the runaway slave Jim. In retelling the celebrated adventure story in Jim’s own voice, Percival Everett upends the convention. James and
Commentary on the young Romantics can be curiously puritanical. Not on saintly John Keats, who died too young to cause any trouble. But Byron and Shelley? Beastly to women, negligent as parents, destructive as friends, oblivious to their own privilege. Feminist observers tend to resemble the English visitors to Geneva in 1816 who borrowed telescopes
It has long been acknowledged that alchemy, however bizarre its premises, is the fore-runner of modern chemistry, compelling a figure as rational as Sir Isaac Newton. Other aspects of Renaissance thought are harder to assimilate. In his study of five crucial figures of the 15th and 16th centuries, Anthony Grafton aims to demonstrate that astrology,
Curses, conjurations, magic circles, incantations, abracadabra, gobbledygook… Why would any serious historian want to write a history of magic books? Owen Davies issues a robust defence: magic is as old as human history, while a study of grimoires is a study of the book itself and its changing format over time. Through the lens of
A fundamental question is posed midway through this narrative by Michael Portillo. Speaking in his guise as a colourfully dressed TV presenter rather than politician, he demands of Natasha Walter as the cameras roll: ‘What did your parents actually achieve?’ They are standing in a nuclear bunker, the site of her parents’ most audacious stunt,
A friend suggested I might bring a feminine twist to this review by imagining what it felt like to be Nick Drake’s mother. It was a startling thought. When I read artists’ biographies I tend to stand with them eye-to-eye, rather than conjure the perspective of an older generation. But the further we are distanced
When a shocking, plot-terminating event occurs almost halfway through The Warlock Effect, it’s not just the prospect of another 200 pages to go that alerts the reader to narrative trickery. The central character, Louis Warlock, is after all a stage illusionist who has already pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of mind-reading in front of
The global disruption of 2020-21 posed a special challenge to novelists. As a subject it seems irresistible; but how to find order and pattern in a series of seemingly blank, eventless days? Stuck in the pandemic doldrums, Tim Parks’s elderly narrator at least has memories of the past and a richly stocked mind to call
George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his
William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the extent of providing the accustomed framing device: the chance discovery of a cache of papers and mementoes. The items listed by ‘WB’ in his ‘Author’s Note’ – a musket ball, a fragment of a Greek
