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1 week ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Nat Segnit |Joanne Brueton |Nicki Hitchcott |Anna Aslanyan
To access over 1000 book reviews, essays and more, subscribe hereCompassion burnoutEdward St Aubyn’s family drama continuedIt is no bad thing, necessarily, for a novelist to be at his own throat, but in the case of Edward St Aubyn, engaged in a career-long struggle with his own stylistic brilliance, the tensions have not always been productive.
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1 month ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Mark Nayler |Norma Clarke |Guy Stagg |Nat Segnit
The North Pole is the point at the top of our planet where the Earth’s axis of rotation meets the surface. It is not a place. Unlike the South Pole, it is located at the centre of a frozen ocean, the ice of which is constantly moving. It has no longitude because all lines converge there. It has no time zone, so you can choose the local hour. The North Pole, writes the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, “is like an abstract painting, freed from all form”.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Cordelia Fine |Robert Bevan |Adam Sutcliffe |Nat Segnit
Rebecca L. Davis’s magisterial new book, Fierce Desires: A new history of sex and sexuality in America, concludes with a 2023 decision by a federal judge in Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, to outlaw the distribution by mail of the abortion drug mifepristone.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Children's literature |Nat Segnit |Lucy Fleming |Imogen Russell Williams
The title of Alex Bell’s new fantasy adventure for nine- to twelve-year-olds sounds like a Wizarding World knock-off churned out by an AI. It’s a pity, because The Glorious Race of Magical Beasts is terrific, alive with invention, dramatically taut and equipped with a metafictional fifth gear that, although reminiscent of certain classics of children’s literature, is anything but derivative.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Nicholas Clee |Andrew Motion |Nat Segnit |disappearanceBy Nicholas Clee
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fifth novel, A Case of Matricide, opens, as did his previous three, with a foreword in which “GMB” gives the background to publication.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Nat Segnit |Andrew Motion |Nicholas Clee |Hal Jensen
Thirteen-year-old Briar and his younger sister Rose are hiding out in an empty house against an unspecified threat. The keys to the house are attached to a see-through plastic keyring containing a photograph of smiling children. Briar wonders if the photograph is of the house’s former occupants, from a time “when there were household goods and things in it making it lived-in”. No, thinks Rose.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Nat Segnit |Owen Matthews |Edward Howell |Andrew Sullivan
The American essayist Fredric Jameson died recently. One of his most famous quips (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. What if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself?
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Nat Segnit |Charles Lipson |Martin Vander Weyer |Olivia Potts
Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime-suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Nat Segnit
Sonny Boy: A Memoir Century, pp.400, 25 Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Nat Segnit
Ellen Barkin, Al Pacino’s lover-cum-prime- suspect in his comeback movie Sea of Love (1989), once dismissed the artifice of the British acting tradition (by way of an oddly ill-tempered pop at Nigel Havers) by comparing it with the immersive naturalism of the greats of post-war American cinema: Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It’s a questionable claim, especially given that in Pacino Barkin had perhaps the least naturalistic co-star imaginable.
