I have a special fascination with war. My grandfather fought in World War I, and two of his sons – my uncles – served in World War II. I think of them every time I read a war novel or memoir, […]
Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels With Herodotus
by on December 24, 2020
Of the many faults I could charge myself with, a preference for familiarity and mundanity, for the comfort of routine, troubles me the most, the more so as many of my closest family members are inveterate travellers and novelty seekers, […]
Allan Gurganus’ White People
by on December 20, 2020
At the close of every year, I survey the neat stacks of books that represent the last twelve months of reading, and take stock of what I’ve read, reminiscing over the writers whose worlds I lived in. One of the […]
Elijah Anderson’s Code Of The Street
by on December 17, 2020
Elijah Anderson is one of America’s most distinguished sociologists, the Sterling Professor of Sociology at Yale University and director of the Urban Ethnography Project, a Yale-based initiative founded to study and disseminate knowledge about America’s inner cities. His 1999 book […]
J.M. Coetzee’s Late Essays, 2006-2017
by on December 14, 2020
John Maxwell Coetzee is justly celebrated as one of the greatest living novelists, a recipient of nearly every major literary award – some of them more than once – but he is also, perhaps not surprisingly, one of our greatest […]
Michael Lind’s The New Class War
by on December 11, 2020
Following the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties in Britain and Europe, a paradigm took hold in the popular press, on both sides of the Atlantic: this populist uprising was a xenophobic, nativist backlash […]
John Gray’s The Silence Of Animals
by on December 8, 2020
I write at the close of a terrible and eventful year, a year that has checked the optimism of even the most enthusiastic champions of progress and offers little hope that the year to come will prove any better. In […]
Paul Claudel’s Five Great Odes
by on December 3, 2020
Paul Claudel was a famous French poet and dramatist, and a six-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was something of a controversial figure before the outbreak of World War II, an outspoken Catholic in the avowedly anti-clerical […]
Derek Raymond’s I Was Dora Suarez
by on November 23, 2020
I have known for some time that the works of Derek Raymond (real name Robert William Arthur Cook) are difficult to come by, but only now, after completing the fourth book in his celebrated Factory quintet, have I perhaps understood […]
Graeme Wood’s The Way Of The Strangers
by on November 18, 2020
In the short interim between my completion of Graeme Wood’s The Way Of The Strangers, one journalist’s account of his encounters with ISIS members and sympathizers and the belief system that informs their worldview, and my beginning this blog post, […]
Irvin D. Yalom’s Becoming Myself
by on November 7, 2020
I can’t now recall what made me reach for Irvin Yalom’s memoir. I had never heard of him, prior to picking up this book, so it wasn’t his sterling reputation as a professor and practitioner of psychiatry, or his successful […]
Paul Fussell’s Class
by on October 24, 2020
My entirely accidental discovery of the late Paul Fussell was one of the high points of October, and his 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Class System kept me in good humour through what was an otherwise cold […]
Janice Fiamengo’s Sons Of Feminism
by on October 20, 2020
My introduction to Janice Fiamengo came seven years ago, when she gave a presentation at the University of Toronto entitled “What’s Wrong With Women’s Studies?” The presentation itself was delayed, owing to the efforts of the usual cabal of rabble-rousing […]
Christopher Lasch’s Women And The Common Life
by on October 17, 2020
According to his daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, who helped assemble and introduce this collection of Christopher Lasch’s essays, the impetus for their writing came from reading both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François Poullain de la Barre – two writers famous for this […]
Yukio Mishima’s Life For Sale
by on October 15, 2020
Motivated, no doubt, by Mishima’s rapidly ascending reputation in the West, publishers in Britain and the United States have finally translated his 1968 novel Life For Sale, bringing it to English-speaking audiences for the first time. It is just the […]