The road to Rome
Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of…
Northern noir
It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…
Sadness and scandal
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
Grief fills the room up
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
Mystery in the Sundarbans: Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh, reviewed
Meet Deen Datta, a nervous, practical and cautious man, born and brought up in Calcutta, who now lives in Brooklyn,…
In Woolf’s clothing
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…
Two men in a boat
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…
Larkin’s misty parks and moors — in all their lacerating beauty
When Philip Larkin went up to St John’s College, Oxford, in the early 1940s, he found himself in a world…
Curious shades of Browne
On the evening of 10 March 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled at a desk in an effort to articulate what…
‘I shall surely sing’
A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable…
