top of page
Pimping unfinished business: Elias Canetti's "The Book Against Death"
Elias Canetti asks if language is the barrier to understanding some kind of universal mortality.
Aug 24, 20247 min read
"Splinters": The Opposite of a Cocktail-Party
Leslie Jamison’s Splinters was released at the end of February to enormous fanfare.
Apr 5, 20247 min read
Minor Details, Major Insights
Under the sombre sky of a rainy city centre, vibrant flags in black, red, green, and white hues stood out distinctly
Mar 20, 20248 min read
Adventure in Solitude
...as she bore both a personal and reportorial witness to the labour of “dying, when one loves life so much.”
Mar 10, 20248 min read
Which Way, Western Man?
Rushdie and Shatz merge in their interest in cosmopolitanism and exile, in the fact of finding oneself between identities...
Dec 3, 20236 min read
Human Wrongs, Animal Rights?
‘We expect extinction after people arrive on an island…survival is the exception.’
Nov 28, 20236 min read
History as it Should Have Been
Truths needn’t always depend upon facts for their expression’. So says Tom Crewe, in the Afterword to The New Life.
Nov 27, 20237 min read
Electra Complex
‘We paint our toenails red, though we put shoes on our feet so no one will see our flashy toes.'
Nov 25, 20237 min read
Above All Else: Desire in Maggie Millner
Love poetry is a risky business. Maggie Millner in her debut Couplets: A Love Story (2023) seems all too aware of this.
Oct 26, 20235 min read
New Caribbean Realism
The original function of the novel, V.S. Naipaul once suggested, was to give us news: to provide society with a very clear idea of itself.
Oct 21, 20239 min read
Song of Summer
As we read through Sensitive to Temperature, it becomes clear that the relationships therein are indeed sensitive to temperature.
Oct 17, 20234 min read
Sharing Space: The House on Via Gemito
SARAH MOORHOUSE - Both Starnone and Ferrante are interested in our imperfect understanding of others.
Oct 7, 20235 min read
In the Manner of a Genius: Reviewing Courtauld's Forgery Exhibition
PHILIPPA CONLON - ‘Imitation’, we are told, ‘is the sincerest form of flattery’.
Oct 5, 20237 min read
The Bedside of the Mind
Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov Gennady Barabtarlo, Princeton, 2017 ‘The most moronic fraternity in the...
Apr 17, 201713 min read
Deluge of Reality
Human Flow Ai Weiwei, Amazon Studios, 2017 We are inundated with film, television, and visual arts that ‘speak to the moment’. Social and...
Apr 17, 20175 min read
Signal to the Gatekeepers
Why Does Inequality Matter? T M Scanlon, Oxford University Press, 2018 Global Inequality Branko Milanovic, Harvard University Press, 2016...
Apr 17, 201711 min read
Behind the Camera
Towards the close of This Is Not a Film (2011), a despondent Jafar Panahi is cajoled by his friend and fellow filmmaker Mojtaba...
Apr 17, 20178 min read
Big Clunking Fist
My Life, Our Times Gordon Brown, Penguin 2017 Shortly after John Smith’s death, Gordon Brown discovered his was one of those professions...
Apr 17, 20177 min read
Mary Poppins, Murderer
Lullaby Leïla Slimani, trans. by Sam Taylor, Faber and Faber, 2018 Dans le jardin de l’ogre Leïla Slimani, Gallimard, 2014 When a writer...
Feb 1, 20179 min read
To Shoot at Mountains
HOPE SUTHERLAND - Min Jin Lee’s new novel traces the nuances of Japanese Korean issues through four generations of family life.
Apr 1, 201613 min read
bottom of page