books

But when the country that designed globalisation, imposed it and benefited from it most votes against it, you have to consider the possibility that it is going to end, and suddenly. If so, you also have to consider a...

it shouldn’t surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing...

The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they’re a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to...

the toppling of solitary and silent reading as the most powerful and important medium were already waiting in the wings while Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg dipped their pens in their dugouts.

unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds...

The dogs are generally more Ward’s concern than Dawkins’s; he is not hugely interested in animals.

Writers who aim at effect by describing possible novels but never write them also impress me less these days. Borges, the arch-indexer of synopses, may have kicked this ball into play, but when Calvino’s character Silas...

Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...

Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...