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
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?