Books & arts
Strange and wonderful
Susan Lever
29 January 2015
Books | Susan Lever reviews Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things
Books & arts
A writer on the reader’s side
Brian McFarlane
20 December 2014
Books | Brian McFarlane finds a collection of essays by Tim Parks about books and writing well worth finishing
Essays & reportage
Loving Europe
Susan Carson
23 October 2013
Charmian Clift’s Peel Me a Lotus has inspired Australian women travel writers for over half a century, but the result has been a quite different kind of writing,…
Books & arts
Poison? Ivy? No: merely the least-read great novelist
Brian McFarlane
29 August 2012
There is no one quite like Ivy Compton-Burnett, writes Brian McFarlane
Books & arts
An outsider at war
Richard Johnstone
4 June 2012
Richard Johnstone reviews Frederic Manning’s extraordinary account of the foot soldiers of the first world war
Books & arts
How weird does this mob still seem?
Brian McFarlane
1 May 2012
Impossibly remote in many ways, the late fifties are portrayed with verve and nuance in John O’Grady’s bestselling novel, writes Brian McFarlane
Books & arts
Plum pudding
Brian McFarlane
18 January 2012
Brian McFarlane reviews a huge collection of the correspondence of the very prolific P.G. Wodehouse
Books & arts
Dickens’s full marathon
Richard Johnstone
8 December 2011
If it reminded us of nothing else, the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birth underlined his extraordinary energy
From the archive
“I feared I would never be able to write a book again”
Geoff Wilkes
20 October 2011
A bestselling author in the early thirties, Irmgard Keun left Nazi Germany in 1936 only to return during the war
Books & arts
Caught again by Catch-22
Brian McFarlane
22 August 2011
On its fiftieth anniversary Brian McFarlane rereads Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel
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