Matthew Richardson 
Your guide to the Booker Prize
Assorted literary grandees will squeeze into their tuxes this evening to compete for the Booker Prize. Of the debut novelists, one previous winner and a brace of old-timers, who stands the… Continue reading
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Review: Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson
Winning the Booker can do strange things. For one, critics tend to become noticeably shyer around authors with some bling in their trophy cabinets, hyperbole blunting their edge. But if… Continue reading
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Modern life in verse
Julia Copus’s new collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans exists in four parts, each in their own way circling the theme of loss. Two parts – ‘The Particella of Franz… Continue reading
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The marriage plot: The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger reviewed
Few could accuse literary fiction of not doing its best to perk up the US export sector recently. It has been a truly remarkable year. A quick glance at my… Continue reading
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Setting sail
The sea has always been a powerful stimulant for the literary imagination, most famously, of course, for the likes of Messrs Hemingway and Melville. Both, indeed, are name-checked in Monique… Continue reading
0 CommentsA pilgrim’s progress
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce starts with a wonderfully simple idea. Harold Fry, resident of 13 Fossebridge Road, gets a letter from an old friend, Queenie… Continue reading
1 CommentMissing Mole
It is thirty years since Adrian Mole first hit our shelves. To celebrate, Penguin has re-released the oeuvre with shiny new covers and a celeb introduction from David Walliams for… Continue reading
2 CommentsThe cruel sea
The early years of the twentieth century hold an irresistible draw for the modern imagination. The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan takes us back to 1914, the world poised on the… Continue reading
0 CommentsHollinghurst’s biographical ambitions
How does fiction mix with biography? Is all biography fiction, or all fiction merely finessed biography? These questions were considered last night, at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, by… Continue reading
1 CommentBiting to the core of Apple’s success
How did Apple gain such a hold on everyday life? Whether it’s checking overnight emails on the iPhone, reading a morning paper on the iPad, walking to the tune of… Continue reading
3 CommentsInterview: Christopher Reid
Christopher Reid’s A Scattering — a collection of poems written in honour of his dead wife, the actress Lucinda Gane — won the 2009 Costa Award. Reid will be reading… Continue reading
1 CommentLooking into the well-read future
E-books can be a strange, parochial beast. As any Kindle-user will know, the content of the Kindle store often varies wildly in terms of design and reading experience. Classics suffer… Continue reading
3 CommentsRumpole’s seasonal cheer
Music fans may groan at the glut of greatest hit collections clogging up shelves at this time of year. Bookshelves are usually immune from such compilations, though the odd one… Continue reading
0 CommentsBecoming great
Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period… Continue reading
0 CommentsOne for the Christmas stocking
Wordy things have had a renaissance of late. Stephen Fry’s superb five-part BBC series, Fry’s Planet Word, aired recently; David Crystal has just produced a handsome new volume, The Story… Continue reading
1 CommentA quirky dish
The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible has produced some great books. Almost all aspects have been covered: the general histories of Melvyn Bragg and Gordon… Continue reading
1 CommentBefore Dickens was a Victorian
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist works as a companion piece of sorts to Claire Tomalin’s rival biography Charles Dickens: A Life. The clue is in the… Continue reading
1 CommentA hatful of facts about … the future of the book
The BBC’s World at One recently asked five leading figures in the literary world for their thoughts on the ‘future of the book’. Here is what they had to say: 1.)… Continue reading
1 CommentThe importance of plot
As literary fly-on-the-wall moments go, it would be hard to beat. John Banville – the most austerely mannered stylist in the language, the archbishop of literary fiction – hands his… Continue reading
1 CommentA Death in Summer – review round up
Benjamin Black – aka John Banville – is back for another round of detective fun with A Death in Summer. Does the crossover magic work for a fifth outing? … Continue reading
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