July 15, 2021 The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley Review by Max Dunbar A nineteenth-century psychiatrist defines paramnesia as The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen…
June 3, 2021 Civilisations by Laurent Binet Translated by Sam Taylor Review by Max Dunbar Reviewers of fiction, trying to make sense of Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, have reached for video game metaphors….
May 25, 2021 Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner Review by Max Dunbar How the Other Half Lie There is a fabulous new genre in commercial fiction. I call it ‘Posh People Getting…
May 13, 2021 The Hard Crowd, Essays 2000-2020, by Rachel Kushner Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Gallery of Souls I’ve Known Many years ago, novelist Rachel Kushner worked in a bar called the Blue Lamp…
April 29, 2021 The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox Reviewed by Max Dunbar In Lords and Ladies, his Faerie novel, Terry Pratchett quotes an old folk rhyme: My mother said I never shouldPlay…
April 8, 2021 A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Age of Acceleration In 2019, the Unherd website carried an article by Gerard DeGroot, about the Chang’e 4 moon landing….
July 9, 2020 Expectation by Anna Hope Review by Max Dunbar Looking back at her hard living past, singer Florence Welch writes in Vogue: I wonder if my young self would be…
July 30, 2019 This Really Isn’t About You by Jean Hannah Edelstein Review by Max Dunbar There’s a common British anecdote that goes: ‘We had some American friends here on holiday, and on the third day…
April 25, 2019 Metropolis by Philip Kerr Reviewed by Max Dunbar Swan Song (For A City) Stephen King once wrote of the ‘Grey Havens’ as a kind of afterlife where fictional…
February 14, 2019 I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux Review by Max Dunbar Alpha males in print tend to be omega males in real life. Friedrich Nietzsche was not rich during his lifetime….
June 14, 2018 The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder Reviewed by Max Dunbar Why Everything Old Is New Again If I had to recommend a historian on the twentieth century terrors to someone…
March 13, 2018 The Good Mothers by Alex Perry Review by Max Dunbar Operation Shame Nowadays, when we think of the mafia, it’s with a sense of nostalgia. David Chase captured the feel…
February 27, 2018 The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar Reviewed by Max Dunbar Command the Mermaid Speak Last year a monster emerged from London’s sewers. The ‘fatberg’ – as the city’s waste disposal…
December 7, 2017 American War by Omar el Akkad Reviewed by Max Dunbar Altered States of America Joan Didion’s recently released notebooks capture the feeling of the American South as it must have…
November 7, 2017 Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown Reviewed by Max Dunbar Nightshade Upon Magic The online OED defines starstruck as ‘Fascinated or greatly impressed by famous people, especially those connected with…
July 14, 2015 Preparations for the Next Life by Atticus Lish Reviewed by Max Dunbar Lish’s novel is mostly about institutions. He writes about armies, prisons, service-level workplaces – his characters sleep in hostels and…
April 30, 2015 The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies by Martin Millar Reviewed by Max Dunbar The Altar of Pity: Martin Millar’s Athens ‘I’ve tried setting a novel in ancient Athens before,’ writes Martin Millar, in…
April 22, 2015 Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson Reviewed by Max Dunbar There’s an episode of the classic US prison show Oz where a new governor brings back the death penalty and sentences Jefferson Keane,…
January 20, 2015 Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself by Walt Whitman, illustrated by Allen Crawford Written by Max Dunbar Moments Before the Wind: The Illustrated Whitman Has anyone tried to illustrate Whitman before? Has anyone not felt dizzy and…
October 30, 2014 J by Howard Jacobson Reviewed by Max Dunbar Milan Kundera wrote that ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Winston Smith, of…
October 16, 2014 Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr Reviewed by Max Dunbar Perfect Tenn: A Life of Tennessee Williams An inconvenience of biography is that before the interesting stuff is revealed, one…
July 24, 2014 The Most Dangerous Book; The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham Reviewed by Max Dunbar This study of how James Joyce’s Ulysses came to be published and set in type is almost as essential as the book…
July 15, 2014 My Crazy Century: A Memoir by Ivan Klima Reviewed by Max Dunbar Dictatorship of the Average This place’ll be a paradise tomorrow. And in every department there’ll be a supervisor with a…
July 15, 2014 The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing By Max Dunbar A decade or so into his career as a bestselling novelist, horror writer Stephen King ran into problems. He was drinking…
July 7, 2014 The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski Reviewed by Max Dunbar I first read House of Leaves as a teenager and fell in love with it: a grunge-emocore memory palace of a novel,…
