The loneliness of the long distance salesman
If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the…
View ArticleBOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter
Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her…
View ArticleThe man who came to dinner
Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of…
View ArticleFriendships resurrected
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years,…
View ArticleNovel ways of writing
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel…
View ArticleParadise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
View ArticleGeorgian romp
London, 1794. It’s a different world from that portrayed by the Mrs Radcliffes and Anons of the time: rich young…
View ArticleLambs to the slaughter
US military personnel remove bags containing bodies of members of the Jim Jones' sect "Temple of people", 23 November 1978, after they arrived from Jonestown, the community's cultural center, where Jim...
View ArticleThe gambler’s daily grind
Lord Doyle is a shrivelled English gambler frittering away his money and destroying his liver in the casinos of Macau.…
View ArticleWho did fall at the Reichenbach Falls?
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their…
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