4+ day, 11+ hour ago   (393+ words) Anyway, I log in and suddenly I’m surrounded by normies and I stumble across something that forces me to reconsider some things. But I don’t think it’s a grift! It’s far too messy and personal to be a grift. She…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (176+ words) My reading experiences with the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski (1920-94), once described by Time magazine as the ‘laureate of American lowlife’, have taught me an important truth about literature: that characters you hate can be at least as compelling as…...

1+ mon, 2+ day ago   (600+ words) After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University. We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor…...

1+ mon, 6+ day ago   (178+ words) Doubleday, pp. 224, £16.99 The deepest mysteries predate his birth. What lies behind the ‘bad blood’ that existed between his uncles and his father? Is it simply, as a censorious aunt maintains, that the Slovakian Tomas was ‘a bad spirit’ who ‘came…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (73+ words) The Spectator John Murray, pp. 309, £20 In his mid-forties, Miles Krzelewski is a graduate student who makes Saul Bellow’s Herzog look like an academic overachiever. After 14 years and 11 changes of subject – including Rabelais’s monsters, Chekhov’s early humour and Tolstoy’s train journeys…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (239+ words) Granta, pp. 232, £14.99 What follows is really rather beguiling. It charts their friendship up to a major exhibition and a life change. Baume is excellent at questioning herself and her motives, wondering if she actually only has acquaintances and whether an…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago   (585+ words) We remember the chamber across the street. We’ve turned State House – now Independence Hall – into a shrine, put it in a park, made it a place of pilgrimage. The room nearby never quite got the same treatment. No bell tower,…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (810+ words) The Spectator The highs and lows of life as an artist ‘Painting is a stupid job. Do something useful and train to be a nurse,’ commented a man beneath a column I wrote last month. Although well used to the…...

2+ mon, 4+ week ago   (697+ words) The Spectator Would you let an app read a book for you? Some time ago, I had a furious conversation with a tech bro, which played out something along these lines: ‘How cool would it be’, said the tech bro,…...

3+ mon, 1+ day ago   (270+ words) Serpent’s Tail, pp. 224, £16.99 For more than half a century, M. John Harrison has been writing about decay and dispossession in a style that is at once restless and exacting. Often an audacious weaver of science fictions, he has also operated…...