The TelegraphBooks Zadie Smith's Grand Union, review: short stories that know just what they're doingThe Telegraph - By Sam LeithAs a rule, publishers are reluctant to publish short stories. They don’t sell all that well – even though bite-sized prose would seem on the face of it perfectly suited to our attention-deficit age. With
The TelegraphBooks Poem of the week: First They Came by Martin NiemöllerThe Telegraph - By William SieghartWilliam Sieghart’s poetry pharmacy prescribes the perfect words to help you through your problems. This week: political apathy I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My father fled the Nazis as a boy,
The TelegraphBooks Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré, review: a tale of espionage and betrayal in the age of BrexitThe Telegraph - By Jake KerridgeEven the most devoted fans of John le Carré will admit the truth of some of the recent complaints made against his spy novels by Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6. “He is so corrosive in his view
The TelegraphTarot How Dali rewrote art history as a deck of tarot cardsThe Telegraph - By Iona McLaren“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them,” said Salvador Dalí. “On the contrary: rationalise them, understand them thoroughly.” The Spanish artist was also a great believer
The TelegraphBooks Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, review: could this 1,000-page epic win the Booker Prize?The Telegraph - By Cal Revely-CalderLucy Ellmann’s seventh novel, Ducks, Newburyport, is not what the French call a roman de gare. It has 1,000 pages, weighs 1.1kg, and – in the larger of its two spliced narratives – is one vast sentence
The TelegraphBooks Hilary Mantel remembers winning the Booker Prize: ‘I said I’d spend the money on sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’The Telegraph - By Hilary MantelWolf Hall was published in April 2009, and as the year advanced, the wind filled its sails. I thought I had a good chance of winning, but I had been a judge myself and know the decision can hang on a It’s
The TelegraphBooks The year's best poems: Forty Names by Parwana FayyazThe TelegraphNames have power. WH Auden had a question he liked to use to test literary critics: “Do you like, and by like I mean really like, not approve of on principle, long lists of proper names such as the Old
The TelegraphBooks TS Eliot's other woman: ‘He loves me – but not in the way usual to men less gifted…’The Telegraph - By Lyndall GordonThis week, TS Eliot’s trove of letters to an early love will finally be unsealed. What secrets will they hold? "I am very dependent upon women,” TS Eliot told his Harvard friend and fellow poet, Conrad
The TelegraphBooks The 39 best children’s books and YA novels of 2019 so farThe Telegraph - By Emily BearnEmily Bearn reviews the best children’s books and young adult fiction of the year. From rollicking adventures to charming picture-books, these are sure to keep even the most restless kids entertained Tzar's
The TelegraphBooks Central Leinster by Andrew Tierney, review: an excellent guide to some of Ireland's most spectacular buildingsThe Telegraph - By Simon HefferThe extension of the Pevsner Buildings of England format into Ireland began more than 30 years ago, and proceeds slowly. The latest volume – Central Leinster (Yale University Press, £45) – covers three
The TelegraphBooksOlga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, 2018 and 2019 Nobel Laureates in literature, are both mavericks — for wildly differentThe Telegraph - By Julian EvansThe simultaneous awarding of two Nobel Prizes in Literature today – to the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk (laureate for 2018) and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke (2019) – shows that ultimately
The TelegraphBooks The 27 best thrillers and crime novels of 2019 so farThe Telegraph - By Jake KerridgeOur critic rounds up the best crime fiction offerings of the year so far Agatha Christie does not receive a great deal of academic attention. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights
The TelegraphBooks Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, review: this smart thriller is like Fargo written by Thomas MannThe Telegraph - By Leo RobsonAbout halfway through this fiercely intelligent thriller, a discussion about why some people are nasty or evil yields a torrent of possibilities. Virtually all the disciplines are represented, from astrology
The TelegraphBooks Why were the Jacobites so hopeless?The Telegraph - By Lewis JonesLewis Jones reviews The King Over the Water by Desmond Seward (Birlinn, £25) It sometimes feels as if the divisions of the English Civil War never really went away, but have simply resurfaced in new guises.
The TelegraphBooks Elton John, Me review: all the sex, drugs and showbiz gossip you could wantThe Telegraph - By Neil McCormickYou can say I am a talentless, bald old poof, if that’s your opinion,” Sir Elton magnanimously notes in his long-awaited autobiography Me. “If it was against the law to express colourful opinions about
The TelegraphBooks Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties by Peter Hennessy, review: erudite and indispensableThe Telegraph - By Simon HefferThis erudite history tells how Britain lost an empire, toyed with the Common Market and was rocked by Profumo, says Simon Heffer One reason why so many history books cover a period before their authors
The TelegraphBooks The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge, review: minor royals, major tycoons — and meThe Telegraph - By Roger LewisConsidering he is what passes these days for a distinguished man, being Chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Chairman of the British Fashion Council, on the Council of the Royal College of Art,
The TelegraphBooks The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman review: Lyra is all grown up in a rich, vivid sequelThe Telegraph - By Rev Richard ColesThe second book of the second trilogy of Philip Pullman’s life of Lyra Belacqua picks up 20 years after the first book, La Belle Sauvage (2017), ended, with the baby Lyra’s arrival at Jordan College, In
The TelegraphBooks First to Fight: The Polish War, 1939 by Roger Moorhouse, review: the truth about Poland's doomed stand against GermanyThe Telegraph - By Noel MalcolmThe Second World War was ushered in by a macabre piece of theatre. On the evening of Aug 31 1939, six members of the SS and German police, pretending to be Polish extremists, took over a German radio near
The TelegraphBooks Poem of the Week: Telephone Repairman by Joseph MillarThe Telegraph - By William SieghartWilliam Sieghart's poetry pharmacy prescribes the perfect words to help you through your problems. This week: feeling isolated There is no denying that modern communications technology has brought a great
The TelegraphJo Johnson Amelia Gentleman on her husband Jo Johnson: 'We keep our professional lives separate. He hasn't even read my book'The Telegraph - By Anna ClarkeAmelia, 47, is a journalist and the author of The Windrush Betrayal. Her husband is the politician Jo Johnson, and she is the sister-in-law of the Prime Minister. She lives in London with Jo and their
The TelegraphBooks The Topeka School: read an exclusive extract from Ben Lerner's new novelThe Telegraph - By Ben LernerIn this exclusive extract from Ben Lerner’s new novel, a father finds himself on the slippery slope into violence From Doña Alana’s one-bedroom apartment on 108th and Amsterdam, an apartment that had materially
The TelegraphBooks Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone, Vol III by Charles Moore, review: a definitive biography brought to a Shakespearean closeThe Telegraph - By Andrew RobertsReviewers are supposed never to use the word “definitive” about a history book or biography, but with Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher, of which this is the triumphant last volume, one has no
The TelegraphBooks The heroic Jewish couple who miraculously smuggled 527 children to safety from WWII occupied FranceThe Telegraph - By Emma DonoghueIrish author Emma Donoghue stumbled across the amazing story of the Marcel Network, and incorporated it into her newbook I googled ‘Holocaust Nice’. I wanted the protagonist of my novel – a 79-year-old
The TelegraphBooks The year's best poems: Comic Timing by Holly PesterThe TelegraphAhead of this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry, The Telegraph is publishing the five nominees for the Best Single Poem award. Today's poem comes from Holly Pester, whose experimental work moves between
The TelegraphBooks My Mother, the Bearded Lady: The Selected Letters of Miles Kington, reviewThe Telegraph - By Christopher HowseI first laughed out loud on page 11. Phew, what a relief! And the hit rate picked up in the succeeding 400 pages. These were, after all, the letters of a man who often said that being funny once a day
The TelegraphBooks Poetry book of the month: Frolic and Detour by Paul MuldoonThe Telegraph - By Tristram Fane SaundersFrolic and Detour is a perfect title: there’s plenty of both in this new collection from Ireland’s most ingenious poet. Paul Muldoon brings centuries of knowledge to anything his eye settles on. How else
The TelegraphBooks Poem of the week: Weathering by Fleur AdcockThe Telegraph - By William SieghartWilliam Sieghart's poetry pharmacy prescribes the perfect words to help you through your problems. This week: insecurity about ageing As we grow older and (often, though not always) wiser, we discover
The TelegraphBooks A Cloud a Day by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, review: how to see Nefertiti in the skyThe Telegraph - By Robert Leigh-PembertonIn July 1959, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin, the only man to survive such an experience, bailed from his Crusader fighter jet at almost 50,000ft into the top of a cumulonimbus cloud. Thrown about for
