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
Carrying water for freedom
Hong Kong’s protestors are brave and, so far, successful. The Chinese Communist Party leadership must be kicking itself
Discussions with a stone wall
Britain’s main gay rights organisation is risking its own future by adopting gender self-ID as its new cause
In the heartlands of white-flag academia
When I tried to find out why my pro-Brexit article was turned down I was rebuffed — showing the intellectual conformism of universities