David Barrett
Pynchon’s 9/11: Things Fall Apart
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel displays all the bravura imagination of the rest of his oeuvre, but sees the elusive writer finally coming to terms with the world
A Novelist With Ice In His Heart
J.M. Coetzee is a curiously chilly author and his Kafkaesque new novel is a parable about the writer’s place in a world ruled by cold rationalism
Clive’s Indian Summer
Book review of A Point of View by Clive James
Unquiet Flows the Don
Book review of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo
ONLINE ONLY: Carmen’s Complaint
The judge who resigned over the Man Booker International Prize being awarded to Philip Roth wilfully ignored the author’s enduring brilliance
Junk and Bunk
Damian Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull is a worthless as it is indulgent
ONLINE ONLY: Arguing About Amis
The tale of Martin Amis’s dead talent is so popular in the press that it has become a cliché. But his detractors’ criticisms increasingly focus on his private life, not his literature
ONLINE ONLY: An Unserious Man
Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding reveals the Wikileaks founder’s facile politics and ignorance of history
Debasing Orwell
An “Orwellian” US-based company, which generates editorial content “without human authoring”, highlights the difference between lazy journalism and sinister civil restriction
Clouds of war and strategic delusions
Britain’s strategic outlook requires realism about the kind of conflicts we are prepared and willing to fight
Search engine: why Germany's foreign policy flounders
Europe’s economic colossus is crippled by identity politics and self-obsession. It exports instability
Alliances and dalliances
“The lethal combination of the Trump administration’s “America First” approach and many European members’ complacent, cowardly and stingy approach risks making Nato irrelevant”