Jonathan McAloon

London

Written for @BBC @guardian @Telegraph @FT @IrishTimes @ElephantMag and lots more. Sarah Montague once called me a "Literary Cricket" on the radio 🦗🦗

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Articles

The trials of the Sycamore Gap

3 days ago | dispatch-media.com | Jonathan McAloon

Step inside The Twice Brewed Inn, and you’re greeted by a large photographic print. It shows imposing dolerite crags, formed hundreds of millions of years ago, with Roman fortifications running along the top. This, manager Steve Blair says, is the “Barbarian’s View” of Hadrian’s Wall. “Getting any barbarians up there would be tricky,” he adds. Blair describes the landscape to me, but falters half way along, searching for a way to articulate an absence.
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman — the first true musical impressionist

3 days ago | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

On the centenary of Erik Satie’s death, music critic Ian Penman wants to downplay the few garish facts people might have picked up about...
From Game of Thrones to Star Wars: why Wagner’s Ring cycle still resonates

Dec 24, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

From the middle of the 19th century, Richard Wagner’s operas were seen as having a pathogenic effect.
Embers of the Hands by Eleanor Barraclough — bogged down in Norse culture

Dec 16, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

In Seamus Heaney’s 1975 poem “The Grauballe Man”, a human sacrifice victim unearthed from a Danish peat bog “seems to weep/ the black...
That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz — comfort songs

Nov 26, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

Near the start of Malachy Tallack’s second novel, 62-year-old Jack Paton picks up his guitar and plays a song he has just heard.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm — flying demons and satanic rock bands

Oct 23, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

While Karl Ove Knausgaard was a university student in early ’90s Bergen, agonising about the sort of writer he might one day become, an...
Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain by William and Jim Reid - pleasantly spiky, unpleasantly needy

Aug 27, 2024 | irishtimes.com | Jonathan McAloon

Never Understood: The Jesus and Mary Chain Author: William Reid, Jim Reid, Ben ThompsonJim Reid, The Jesus and Mary Chain’s frontman, remembers an interview with mortification. On Belgian TV in 1986, a presenter opened by challenging the band’s “strange attitude” and the “chaos” that seemed to follow them.
My Beloved Life — a story of modern India

Jul 24, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

People in Amitava Kumar’s fourth novel often doubt their ability to tell stories. “I’m not a writer,” a rural doctor tells another character.
The Second Coming — Garth Risk Hallberg’s ambitious novel of many voices

Jul 19, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

Mercer Goodman, one of at least 20 point-of-view characters in Garth Risk Hallberg’s bestselling 2015 epic City on Fire, set out to write...
Going Home — a different kind of love story, beautifully told

Jul 10, 2024 | ft.com | Jonathan McAloon

In the decade since he founded the Guardian’s Long Read section with colleagues, Tom Lamont has returned frequently in his writing to...