Books

The publishing industry has remained remarkably robust through the pandemic, but the coronavirus has exacerbated some alarming trends for the UK’s literary scene. I only realised this the other day while I was actually doing it, but of all the things I’ve missed during the pandemic – popping out for a pint, going to the […]

In both war and peace, a love of reading made Napoleon history’s biggest bibliophile.  When you’re an enthusiastically expansionist autocrat and visionary military leader building an empire that will cover almost an entire continent your work doesn’t, it’s fair to say, leave much time for hobbies. Julius Caesar produced no macramé of note; Alexander the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a superb new novel which creates a horrifyingly plausible near-future for Margate. There’s a different kind of sky over the Isle of Thanet, a vast canopy, bigger even somehow than that over the flatlands of the Fens. And the light, the light is different there, and when the sun sets over the sea in […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on two new European novels which highlight the underappreciated artistry of translators The job of a literary translator can be a thankless one. It’s a multiskilled calling with two main demands: fluency in at least one other language that isn’t your own and an exceptional talent for writing. It’s a role requiring immense artistic […]

Born 200 years ago this month, Charles Baudelaire continues to inspire memes, musicians and even Monty Burns in The Simpsons. CHARLIE CONNELLY explains his remarkable relevance. The most famous image of Charles Baudelaire is a portrait taken in or around 1863 by the Parisian photographer Etienne Carjat. It was part of a series called Galerie Contemporaine, in […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a brilliant writer whose recently rediscovered story of a Jew forced to become a fugitive of the Nazis has echoes of his own itinerant, tragic life. When 27-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz leaned on the deck rail and watched the sun set over the Atlantic on October 29, 1942, he felt his wanderings […]

The novelist considers the Japanese appreciation of all that is both imperfect and impermanent in the works of man and nature One of them is about twelve inches by eight, is entirely covered by a patina that ranges from light tan to black, and has a bottom dimpled and hummocked by having been bashed repeatedly […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the radical double life of beloved children’s author Arthur Ransome. Few writers have evoked a more bucolic view of England than Arthur Ransome. In the dozen books that comprise the Swallows and Amazons series he conjured magical stories of endless school holidays spent camping, fishing and messing about in boats, exploring nature and making […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an important new book that concentrates on the societies – not the states – that have emerged from communism. In 1996 Britain was, well, a bit full of itself. Nothing new there of course, but this time there was a tangible positivity about a new and vigorous assertion of Britishness. It felt as […]

Long sceptical about whether such a phenomenon existed, CHARLE CONNELLY starts to wonder if there might be something in it after all. I sat down to write this piece about writer’s block at eight o’clock this morning. It’s now 11.20am and I’m only just putting words onto the blank document that’s been sitting here open and […]

A new book by writer and broadcaster David Baddiel gets right to the heart of anti-Semitism, and why it has taken such a hold on the left. Smear. Bundled up in that single syllable are years of pain and anger felt by Jewish people who have failed to persuade the putative anti-racist movement that we know […]

A new book by Peter Oborne chronicles Boris Johnson’s history of deceit and how his time in Downing Street has poisoned British political culture.  In an interview with the American television network CBS earlier this month Boris Johnson sought to reassure president Joe Biden that he would do nothing to harm the Good Friday agreement. Johnson tried […]

A brilliant new novel shows how the city’s traumatic past still has a powerful hold on Europe, three decades on. A few years ago I emerged from the mouth of a tunnel onto scrubby ground next to a house just outside Sarajevo airport. The sunshine after the darkness had me screwing up my eyes, my big […]

Editor-at-large ALASTAIR CAMPBELL interviews novelist Kate Mosse about her campaigning for feminism, and now for carers, and why she won’t be writing a Brexit or Covid novel just yet. The thing about rights, says historical novelist Kate Mosse, is that it can take years, decades, centuries, to win them, but they can be lost all […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on legendary literary character from France now enjoying some new exposure thanks to Netflix. Paris, June 1929. A man calls at the Rue Saint Placide apartment of wealthy widow Madame Casanova, who is well-known in the city as a collector of gems and jewellery. He is handsome, about 30 years old and wearing an impeccably […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a writer who helped shape Italy, and whose fate still consumes the country. Does anything burn more fiercely in a human being than a sense of injustice? We can all think of times we’ve been wronged or a verdict has gone unfairly against us, trivial or ruinous, that can still have us […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an unidentified woman whose death has captivated for more than a century, and a new book which tries to tell her story. The chances are you’ve already seen her face. Nobody knows her name, she’s been dead for well over a century, but the chances are you’ve seen her face. L’Inconnue de […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the remarkable story of Helga Weyhe, a shopkeeper who operated in gentle defiance of both the Nazis and the communists, to satisfy her customers… unless they liked detective stories. There’s a tangible stillness hanging over Salzwedel, a small town halfway between Berlin and Hamburg. Time seems to pass more slowly there, emphasised by a […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a writer who brings home the strange attraction that hotels have for us, and what it is exactly he is missing most about them. I had an e-mail from a friend the other day that felt like it came from another era. She had, she told me, just booked a long weekend in Bucharest […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a new book telling the story of Rotwelsch, a secret language developed by the thieves, beggars and itinerants of central Europe. Back in the 1990s I spent several summers working on a travelling music festival. For four months every year a group of us would be on the road, travelling the country […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY reports on the quest for the remains of a writer likened to the Bard, and the posthumous activities of other great authors. Imagine if William Shakespeare’s remains were no longer in his grave inside Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. Imagine if they’d been lost, possibly in an act of desecration during a traumatic […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the highlights of a highly unusual literary year… and some horrors lying ahead in 2021. It feels a little bit weird looking back at 2020. Not least because it never really felt like a proper year, more as if we got stuck in a really long week in mid-March and never made […]

FLORENCE HALLETT on the understanding offered by a new book and exhibition which focus on Henri Matisse’s interest in the written word and gives an insight into his controversial wartime experiences In an interview in 1941, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) recalled the first canvas he ever painted. It was a still life of his law books, […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on an eerie German story and its remarkable creator. If anyone does Christmas well it’s the Germans. Glühwein, Stollen, the Christmas market; they even convinced the world bringing a conifer indoors once a year and covering it in stuff was a pretty neat idea. When it comes to the December festivities it’s fair […]

Despite his establishment credentials the author John le Carré remained an outsider all his life, says CHARLIE CONNELLY, and was increasingly radicalised by Europe and Brexit.  There’s a broad perception that people become calmer politically as they grow older, the youthful firebrand activist gradually sensing the flames of radicalism dying down towards a dotage of faintly glowing […]

It was supposed to be the year to catch up on your reading. Don’t worry if you didn’t get through too many books. CHARLIE CONNELLY has some more to recommend… Sooo, have you read much this year? Like many people I had great ambitions of tucking in to some seriously weighty volumes once the lockdowns […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY recommends a handful of books to kick off your Christmas shopping. I know the C word is a touchy subject at the moment and it still feels a wee bit early to mention it somehow even though we’re in what’s undeniably December. Given that our winter hootenanny is likely to be reduced considerably […]

Jonathan Sale on the centenary of a courtroom drama centred on Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem, If, and the continuing power of the very iffy word itself. If – and it’s a big if – I’m any judge of groundbreaking literary cases, this month sees the centenary of a wonderful example of poetic justice in action:  Rudyard Kipling […]

A century after his first appearance, and with a new film out next month, which incarnation of the Belgian detective has been the finest? Benjamin Ivry exercises his little grey cells to assess the candidates. It is a classic puzzler worthy of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction… why some actors who have excelled in […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY pays tribute to the late Jan Morris, the author he credits with firing his passion for the continent. At the end of her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, published in 2001, Jan Morris speculated about an afterlife where, “I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me. […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a surreal awards ceremony and some sublime literature. We’ve become so used to this year’s General Weirdness that a Booker Prize ceremony without the crescendo hubbub of increasingly pissed publishers barely raised an eyebrow. The General Weirdness dictated that this year the bunfight at the Guildhall would be replaced by an audience-free, […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the plight of bookshops during the pandemic, and how you can help them in their fight for survival. The other night I watched a feature-length documentary profiling New York’s independent bookshops and antiquarian book dealers. No, wait, come back, it was even more gripping than it sounds. The Booksellers features a delicious […]