"There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think," wrote Amy Bellette in a letter in Philip Roth's 2007 novel Exit Ghost. "That time is coming to an end." How enthusiastically Roth himself endorsed this position was not entirely ...
It is hardly acute literary criticism to say that Sue Townsend really knows how to hit the nail on the head, but that she does so with such apparent effortlessness and consistency is surely worth remarking. Witness a poignant little diary entry from ...
"And what if," wonders 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, taking her first plane journey, "oxygen deprivation in the cabin caused one to think in idle spirals and desperate verbal coils like this for the rest of one's life?" This anxiety – experienced as mild ...
If readers surfacing from the hectic activity of Ordinary Thunderstorms's opening chapters suspect that William Boyd has set himself the straightforward task of producing an efficient, multi-stranded thriller, a clue soon emerges to hint at a more ...
If power hangs in the balance between the two genders in Tom Sharpe's latest blast of farce – his first novel since Wilt in Nowhere five years ago – then it's a moot point whether it's a commodity worth lusting after. Power, as ever in Sharpe's world, ...
The lives that human beings think they have, and the world that they believe themselves to inhabit, are simply the result of a minutely imagined and executed practical joke. But what a joke! "The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should ...
"I like purple passages in my life," Muriel Spark once told an interviewer. "I like drama. But not in my writing. I think it's bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader - much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short." ...
Alex Clark has been a Booker fan since the age of 16, so was thrilled to be picked as a judge. But would her choice prevail? ...
Arts & entertainment: Kitty Empire, Bidisha, Philip French and more writers and critics on the art that changed their ...
OK, fair enough, I'm sure I won't convert as many of you as Morgan Spurlock did when he subsisted on a diet of Big Macs, but all I'm saying is - that's the last time I go to McDonald's. Let me pause to flash my foodie credentials: I promise faithfully ...
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