-
Nov 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | A.S.H. Smyth |Maggie Fergusson |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Caspar Henderson
Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels. Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age.
-
Sep 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Philip Clark |A.S.H. Smyth |Christopher Sandford |Sam Forster
In 1961, the folk guitarist Barry Kornfeld moved back to Manhattan after spending a year in Boston. The Greenwich Village folk musicians he called friends, who before his trip to Boston had been enduring a hand-to-mouth existence, were now making a living playing their music in clubs along MacDougal Street — not necessarily “a good living,” Kornfeld noted, but certainly enough to get by. Kornfeld spotted another difference, too.
-
Sep 12, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Alexander Larman |A.S.H. Smyth |James Delingpole
An unusual disclaimer greets the reader on the title page of this memoir of an actor chiefly known for starring as the lovable goofball Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld. “Neither the US Army nor any other component of the Department of Defense has approved, endorsed, or authorized this book,” it notes. But in the event the Pentagon probably needn’t have worried.
-
Jul 10, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | A.S.H. Smyth
‘Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?’ Richard Flanagan’s memoir opens at the Ohama coal mine in Japan, once home to his father and a host of other POW slave labourers.
-
Feb 9, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Adrian Brune |Robbie Mallett |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth |A.S.H. Smyth
Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea. Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear.
-
Feb 8, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Robbie Mallett |A.S.H. Smyth |Freddy Gray |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth
“Do you like to dig?” That’s the first question seasoned Antarcticans ask when a scientist tells them he’ll spend winter on the white continent. Digging snow away from doors, windows and shipping containers saps your energy, but they’re not asking about that. Digging is a symbol for all the unglamorous physical tasks that will come to define your life.
-
Feb 8, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | A.S.H. Smyth |Robbie Mallett |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth |Freddy Gray
In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel — Hard by a Great Forest — billed as “a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland,” I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity.
-
Jan 31, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | A.S.H. Smyth
Hard by a Great Forest Bloomsbury, pp.325, 16.99 In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel billed as ‘a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland’, I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity.
-
Dec 6, 2023 | 
spectator.com.au | A.S.H. Smyth
The Pole and Other Stories Harvill Secker, pp.272, 20 New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour.
-
Jul 22, 2023 | 
spectator.com.au | A.S.H. Smyth
This week, the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, made pretty much the only blunder which, in the eyes of Falkland Islanders, there is no coming back from: referring to the Falklands as ‘Las Malvinas’. The row was sparked after the EU chose to sign a declaration with Argentina and 32 other South American countries, referring to the UK overseas territory as both ‘Islas Malvinas’ and the ‘Falkland Islands’.
