Salesman for the suburban way of life: John Cheever at home in Ossining, New York, 1979. Photograph: Paul Hosefros/ Getty Images Blake Bailey seems to specialise in writing the lives of self-destructive American writers – first Richard Yates, now John ...
A character in John Banville's new novel is compared to an over-cleaned painting, "brilliant and faded at the same time". That's not a remark that could apply to the book itself, whose brushwork is luminous, but everything in it does have a double ...
The news that Arthur Ransome (see Adam Mars-Jones, p20) led a double life as both the confidant of senior Bolsheviks and an agent of M16 should be no surprise. From Marlowe and Defoe to Greene and le Carré, espionage and literature have been tightly ...
In 1919, Sir Cavendish-Bentinck summed up Arthur Ransome's character for the benefit of the Foreign Office: "He is really rather a coward and is trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds." It's hard to dispute that verdict. Ransome had ...
Clive James: he has all the opinions. Photograph: Rex Features Hedy Lamarr appeared nude in the notorious 1933 film Extase and co-patented in 1942 a primitive device to protect radio signals from being jammed. Will Hay was one of Britain's most popular ...
There's a moment in AS Byatt's immense new novel when a young woman gets some advice about the tentative designs she has drawn: "Define their limits." Her patterns acquire force and coherence almost magically when surrounded by bold lines. Defining ...
This is a curiosity, a classy (if not class-bound) recasting of the "misery memoir" which scrupulously removes the wallowing but doesn't bring in anything to replace it. The misery in the memoir affects William's older brother, Richard, who, after an ...
In MC Escher's 1956 lithograph The Print Gallery, represented space is made to curve so that what seems to be an exhibit hanging on the wall turns out, as the eye travels over the picture, to contain the entire gallery. In visual art, an effect of this ...
The title might be Liberty, justifiably so since it concerns the preparations for Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July parade 2006, but the real concern of Garrison Keillor's new novel is with a rather less glamorous abstraction, almost liberty's shadow self: ...
Review: The Widows of Eastwick by John UpdikeJohn Updike's spellbinding prose remains undiminished but the magic of his Eastwick coven is weaker, says Adam ...
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