Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Kit de Waal’s second novel, The Trick to Time, begins with Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish immigrant, standing by her window in the middle of the night. She notices a man in the building across from her ...

Trapped in small-town Ireland and bereft after a break-up, 23-year-old Lampy wonders how he might ‘tell his grandfather that he wanted to find a place where the measure of a man was different’. This ...

The first novel in Paul Auster’s trilogy has Daniel Quinn, listless widowed mystery writer, receiving a late-night telephone call. The speaker asks for Paul Auster (‘someone he was not’), supposedly a ...

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, ‘will give you all the facts’ – as biographies do in ...

WE CANNOT STOP talking about Sylvia Plath. Or rather, talking about Sylvia Plath has become a way of talking about other issues – issues which are unrelated to her poems themselves, issues which are ...

Cato – the Elder, the Censor – probably didn’t say it in so many words, but there’s no doubt that he meant it, favoured it, and would have loved to have been alive to see it when it did actually ...

The young Irmgard Paul, out walking with her mother in their home town of Berchtesgaden in the late 1930s, remembers being told that, thanks to the large groups of SS men guarding Germany’s messianic ...

Not long after J G Ballard’s death, I was exchanging emails with Mike Moorcock, one of Ballard’s oldest and best friends. The avuncular old gent at whose feet Will Self and Iain Sinclair sat, Mike ...

One evening in late 1908, Henri Matisse introduced a short, dapper visitor to the community of often struggling artists who tended to congregate at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. Picasso was there, ...

The English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of ...