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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Lee Langley |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
Whisper it, very quietly, but the now 87-year-old author Thomas Pynchon is having something of a moment in 2025. Not only has his 1990 novel Vineland supposedly served as the loose inspiration for the eagerly awaited new Paul Thomas Anderson-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration One Battle After Another,but the near-impossible has been announced: Pynchon will publish a new novel, entitled Shadow Ticket,around the time of the movie’s release.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Hugh Schofield |Lee Langley |Gavin Mortimer |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government — and its cheerleaders on social media — and the answer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far-right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Ian Buruma |Philip Mansel |Lee Langley |David J. Garrow
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and bleeding faces grotesquely disfigured.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Lee Langley |Jordan Peterson |Owen Matthews |Matthew Lynn
Call it a mosaic. Here it all is — the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna — not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of the poorest districts, debris from Allied bombs still filling the basements in 1966. Robert Simon has worked in the market for seven years, shifting crates of swedes, restacking firewood, cleaning the floor at the fishmonger.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Lee Langley
The Catchers Salt, pp.272, 10.99 They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Lee Langley
They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading south in search of hill country music that could make the record company (and, relatively, the recorder) rich. The singer would get a flat fee of $30. Among themselves, over a beer, the catchers called it panning for gold, diving for pearls, trapping fireflies in a jar.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Jonathan Boff |Nigel Jones |Paul du Quenoy |Lee Langley
These days we use radar to help us park our cars, but during the early years of World War Two it was white hot technology and a closely guarded military secret. First used to detect aircraft in 1935, within a few years it had helped win the Battle of Britain and sink the Bismarck. It was so secret that work on it was forbidden even to physicists of genius who had fled the Nazis.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Olivia Cole |Zoe Strimpel |Lee Langley |David Sexton
There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels — part of what she has termed a “marathon” of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers of her psychological perceptiveness and her ability to transport us instantly to Crosby, her fictional town in contemporary Maine.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Lee Langley |Cosmo Landesman |Sean Thomas |disgracefullyBy Cosmo Landesman
Nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of Olga Tokarczuk. Her latest novel starts with an epigraph taken from Fernando Pessoa: “The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.” Wild deer were murder suspects in her surreal and beautiful 2018 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This time nature itself plays a significant role.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Sebastian Shakespeare |Lee Langley |disgracefullyBy Cosmo Landesman |Cosmo Landesman
Brighton, EnglandRecently I lost my mother, my job and nearly my wife in quick succession (she was diagnosed with breast cancer). My son now needles me by asking what I do all day. “Son, I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. I have dark thoughts.” That is what I want to say, but I don’t have the courage. It is hard to explain to an eleven-year-old that the black dog can be as demanding as any full-time employer. Besides he wouldn’t get the Blade Runner reference.
