Diary: A visit to a Jerusalem poet
February 13, 2020
No Comments
Tel Aviv gleamed like a jewel beneath us as we landed at Ben Gurion Airport at night and went through
Why is Houellebecq’s remorseless pessimism so appealing?
October 31, 2019
No Comments
Serotonin By Michel Houellebecq, William Heinemann, 309pp, £20/$27 Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and professional contrarian, delights in puncturing metro-liberal
The malodorous politics behind Chanel No 5
August 15, 2019
No Comments
Chanel’s Riviera: Life, Love and Struggle for Survival on the Côte d’Azur 1930-1944 By Anne de Courcy Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
Kociejowski’s poems are an antidote to the dumbing down of modern life
May 23, 2019
No Comments
Collected Poems By Marius Kociejowski Carcanet, 99pp, £12.95/$18.99 The literary travelogue – with elements of history, anthropology, personal experience and
From American Psycho to Charlie Hebdo
May 9, 2019
No Comments
In May 2015, some 200 members of PEN America, a respected literary organisation to which many writers belong, decided not
Fellini’s films mingle piety with paganism
January 17, 2019
No Comments
Fellini’s Eternal Rome By Alessandro Carrera Bloomsbury, 186pp, £65/$80 No film conjured so memorably the flashbulb glitz and moral darkness
The suffering poet who sighed for lost Edens
November 22, 2018
No Comments
The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume II Edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Krull, Faber and Faber, 1,025pp, £35/$35 Since
Epicentre of low life and high conversation
November 1, 2018
No Comments
Soho in the Eighties by Christopher Howse, bloomsbury, 266pp, £20 Soho in the 1970s, with its strip joints and steamed-up
The aftermath of the Brazilian renaissance
October 4, 2018
No Comments
Brazil: A Biography by Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, Allen Lane, 761pp, £30 In a now famous book of 1928,
A comedy obsessed with divine justice
September 13, 2018
No Comments
Dante thought politicians had ruined Italy. His poem takes revenge
A comedy obsessed with divine justice
September 13, 2018
No Comments
Dante thought politicians had ruined Italy. His poem takes revenge, says Ian Thomson Dante Alighieri has been dead for 700
Feted by his fans, abused by racists
August 16, 2018
No Comments
Making Oscar Wilde by Michèle Mendelssohn, OUP, 360pp, £20 In January 1882, Oscar Wilde toured America with a trunkful of