At 74, the comedian Alexei Sayle is approaching a dangerous phase for veteran British leftists: becoming a national treasure. Once described by special branch, in a surveillance file gleefully quoted in this memoir,... Read more »
Pulitzer prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore’s new book addresses the threat posed to liberal democracy by artificial intelligence. According to Lepore, the extraordinary power of private tech companies led by men whose priorities... Read more »
Something is happening to literary time. In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers... Read more »
If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and... Read more »
Which, in your opinion, is the worst current cultural trend: social media influencers; unregulated wellness practitioners; macho manosphere posturers; psychedelic bores; cultural appropriators? The good news is that, with Octavio Rettig, the central... Read more »
The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian (Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99)American bestseller Bohjalian deserves to be far better known in the UK, although, as the first line of his 26th novel points out, “It is... Read more »
Can Nothing Save Us? by Irvine Welsh review – US family saga is a late-career triumph | Irvine Welsh
“Why expect unconditional love from somebody you’ve brought into a fucked, dying planet, who then has to sit around and watch you screw it up even more?” So muses twentysomething college dropout Luke Ayrton... Read more »
A stinging dissection of wealth, class and the media, Natasha Brown’s satire begins with a man named Jake gazing at a gold bar he has found at a farm in West Yorkshire.... Read more »
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this... Read more »