Head North by Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham
Review by Rob Spence When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in October last year that the multi-billion pound rail infrastructure programme HS2 would not, after all, be completed, leaving Manchester…
Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jane Potter
Review by Rob Spence If you attended a British secondary school at any time from the late nineteen sixties until the present day, at some point you will have encountered…
Marcel Proust by Michael Wood
Review by Rob Spence It’s not often that one gets the chance to begin a review with a boast, so I’ll get it over with now: I have read À…
In Italy, by Cynthia Zarin
Review by Rob Spence This is a curious little book, which shouldn’t really work, but does, offering the reader a delightful series of fresh impressions gleaned from the writer’s engagement…
The Bone Flower by Charles Lambert
Review by Rob Spence We are in London at its Victorian zenith, a city of imperial majesty, and also a city where the most abject poverty exists side-by-side with the…
Encounters With Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill
The growth of social media seems to have generated a huge increase in madness. Not real madness, of course. Rather, it’s the condition affected by so many TikTokers and Instagrammers,…
Penelope Unbound, by Mary Morrissy
Reviewed by Rob Spence I was once assured by a James Joyce scholar that there was more critical material on Joyce than there was on Shakespeare – pretty good going,…
Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985 – 2023, by Amit Chaudhuri
Review by Rob Spence In recent years, when reading a book of poems by some acclaimed contemporary poet, I’ve often thought, “wait a minute, this poem is almost exactly the…
The Evenings by Gerard Reve
Translated by Sam Garrett Review by Rob Spence In Amsterdam, just after the Second World War, Frits, a young office worker, lives a dreary and unfulfilling existence. He lives in…
Dearest Darling Sophie: Letters of George Devine, 1940-1945, edited by Harriet Devine
Review by Rob Spence Unless you are Tristram Shandy, you probably don’t know when and where you were conceived. If you are Harriet Devine, on the other hand, you know…
The House on the Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone
Translated by Oonagh Stransky Review by Rob Spence The British are not receptive to literature in translation. Sure, any decent bookshop will have a smattering of foreign classics – Proust,…
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
Reviewed by Rob Spence A new novel from Tan Twan Eng is a major literary event. His many admirers have been waiting over ten years since the publication of his…
The Man With Miraculous Hands by Joseph Kessel
Translated by Helen Weaver and Leo Raditsa Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were asked to suggest which real-life character was to be played by Woody Harrelson in his next…
After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport
Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were tired of aimless flânerie in the Paris of the twenties, and fancied seeing Josephine Baker dancing at the Folies Bergère, you might be…
This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 -1960, by Robert Colls
Review by Rob Spence Last November, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, strikes by essential workers, transport chaos, a cost-of-living crisis and the continuing devastation of the war in…
Seven for a Secret by Mary Webb
Review by Rob Spence If you know Mary Webb’s work at all, it’s likely that you do so through her most successful novel, Precious Bane, published in 1926, and later…
H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe
Review by Rob Spence 2022 is a significant year in modernist studies: it marks the publication centenary of two of the definitive examples of literary modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses and…
The Former Boy Wonder by Robert Graham
Review by Rob Spence Pete Duffy is having a mid-life crisis. His fiftieth birthday is on the horizon, and his career as a freelance rock music journalist is in freefall….
Into Egypt by Rosalind Brackenbury
Review by Rob Spence This novel, first published nearly half a century ago, deals with matters which still, sadly, resonate today. Our protagonist is an idealistic young English woman, Jo…
Living and Dying With Proust, by Christopher Prendergast
Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be attempted only by the brave or…
The Lifeline by Hugo Charteris
By Rob Spence If you are, as I am, a child of the fifties, then one of your first televisual memories will be of the ITV series The Adventures of…
Broken Lights, by Basil Ramsay Anderson
Reviewed by Rob Spence Years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class on the topic of the poetry of the bard of Orkney, George Mackay Brown. I made a passing…
King Arthur’s Death by Michael Smith
Reviewed by Rob Spence Last year, I reviewed Michael Smith’s excellent new version of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has now turned his attention to…
Anthony Burgess, Collected Poems, edited by Jonathan Mann
Reviewed by Rob Spence Inevitably, when Anthony Burgess is mentioned, people who have heard of him will associate him with the notorious novel and then film A Clockwork Orange. Often…