The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
Review by Rob Spence English-language fiction set in colonial Malaya tended in the past to focus on the lives of the Empire types who ruled the roost back then: Somerset…
Winterman by Alex Walters
Review by Rob Spence East Anglia has quite a lot of previous when it comes to crime fiction: Colin Watson’s chronicles of Flaxborough, James Runcie’s Grantchester mysteries, and Nicola Upson’s…
To Kill the Truth by Sam Bourne
Review by Rob Spence We live in an age of fake news, propagated by politicians, celebrities and media organisations. Perhaps we always have – from the tricks of Elizabethan propaganda…
The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes
Review by Rob Spence This remarkably compelling memoir is, surprisingly, the first prose publication of George Szirtes, one of our most distinguished poets. At its centre is the disquieting life…
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: the Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín
Review by Rob Spence Tóibín’s title, of course, comes from Lady Caroline Lamb’s snap judgement of Byron; it’s not clear whether the author here intends the epithets to be applied…
The Flame by Leonard Cohen
Edited by Robert Faggen & Alexandra Pleshoyano Review by Rob Spence For a while in the mid sixties to the early seventies, the singer-songwriter reigned supreme in popular music. Dylan,…
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Review by Rob Spence The strap line chosen by the publishers for the cover of this massive novel is instructive: “None of us…
Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahnuik
Review by Rob Spence I began reading this book just as the outcry over the Trump regime’s treatment of migrants was gathering pace. It seemed an appropriate time to enter…
Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron
Review by Rob Spence The German artist Kurt Schwitters developed a method , which he called “Merz” by which his canvases would be constructed using hundreds of fragments of material…
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri
Reviewed by Rob Spence I read most of this novel on a plane, and it struck me that it was appropriate to consume it in the transient, somehow timeless and…
Anthony Burgess Centenary – a Reading List
By Rob Spence Anthony Burgess, whose centenary is celebrated this year, remarked ruefully on more than one occasion that he produced as many novels in a year as E.M. Forster…
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet by Thomas Dilworth
Review by Rob Spence Ask a reasonably well-educated person to name some Anglophone modernist poets, and you are sure to hear the names of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Mention…
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison
Reviewed by Rob Spence I come from Manchester, so I know about rain. Actually, Manchester’s reputation as the rainy city is, as I am overfond of pointing out, a result…
Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel
Translated by Amanda DeMarco Reviewed by Rob Spence Berlin is one of my favourite cities, and I have spent a lot of time walking around its fascinating streets. So the…
The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré
Reviewed by Rob Spence The very name seems mysterious: perhaps a whiff of the matinée idol about it, speaking of a glamorous and wealthy background. And although, like many a…
Loose Canon: the extraordinary songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin by Ian Shircore
Review by Rob Spence It’s now over forty years since I discovered the songs of Pete Atkin and Clive James. In a wonderful series of albums in the late sixties…
Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport
Reviewed by Rob Spence We seem to have a glut of popular historians at the moment. Simon Schama, Tom Holland, Peter Frankopan, Lara Feigel, Mary Beard are among the names…
The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Nazim Dikbas Reviewed by Rob Spence Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, is the kind of public intellectual that we need to cherish, especially in these dark days for his…
Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson
Reviewed by Rob Spence 2016 is clearly going to be the year of Shakespeare, though it seems rather gruesome to ‘celebrate’ the anniversary of his death. In 1964, when the…
Out in the Midday Sun by Margaret Shennan
Reviewed by Rob Spence The title of this book recalls Noel Coward’s jaunty song about the mad English, of course, and perhaps suggests that this will be a light-hearted romp…
The Bitter Taste of Victory by Lara Feigel
Reviewed by Rob Spence This book is a companion piece to Feigel’s The Love-Charm of Bombs (reviewed here), which examined the lives of some prominent writers in London during the Blitz and afterwards….
Reading Manchester
By Rob Spence After the recent Budget, the Treasury published a document outlining the government’s plans for regional spending. In among the references to particular cities and regions was a…
Ezra Pound: Poet, Volume III by A. David Moody
Reviewed by Rob Spence A. David Moody’s monumental biography of Ezra Pound reaches its conclusion with this third and final volume. Having taken the story of Pound’s increasingly erratic life…
London Rain by Nicola Upson
Reviewed by Rob Spence Josephine Tey was a writer of unusual detective fiction in the so-called Golden Age of the genre. Her best-known, and most unusual novel was The Daughter of…