Books

The folk musician whose memoir gets closer to the essence of Englishness than most Shirley Collins performs on stage during Supersonic Festival on June 24, 2018 in Birmingham, England. (Photo by Katja Ogrin/Redferns) – Credit: Redferns Think about what fires and inspires great literature. Passion, intensity, strong characters, gripping stories, powerful imagery, a timelessness of […]

As a new initiative to encourage the reading of fast fiction is launched, CHARLIE CONNELLY sings the praises of short-form literature. ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’ is the famous response attributed to Ernest Hemingway when challenged to write an entire story in six words. This was the ultimate short story and the quickest of […]

Come rain or shine, CHARLIE CONNELLY has swum in the Channel every day since last summer. He explains how it can boost your energy and self-esteem. If you look closely at the photograph above, you’ll see that between the frost-covered shingle and those majestic massing clouds there’s a tiny speck of a person. That person […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on a reissued classic that celebrates wanderlust and everything that Brexit seeks to deprive us of. Of all the rage-inducing aspects of the last three years, two comments above all continue to have me grinding my teeth and occasionally waking up shouting in the middle of the night. Both of them came from […]

JASON SOLOMONS on a new book which captures – and cherishes – the idiosyncrasies and occasional flaws of the capital. London is the best city in the world. As soon as you surrender to this indisputable fact, then you can set sail on the tide of emotion and information that swells through a new book, […]

The rising popularity of translated fiction shows we remain a country keen to look and learn beyond our shores, says Charlie Connelly. I bring a glimmer of hope. It is just a glimmer, a small one, and perhaps one in the manner of the email I received from a cross-channel ferry company last week announcing […]

The author of Das Boot would have hated the new TV adaptation – but he hated most things. CHARLIE CONNELLY on the troubled mind which could never escape the terror of war beneath the waves. Lizzy Caplan as Carla Monroe in Das Boot, 2018. PHOTO: IMDB – Credit: Archant One morning in the spring of […]

Charles Dickens’ biographer and great-great-great-granddaughter explains why he was one of literature’s great – if unacknowledged – Europhiles. Charles Dickens pictured dreaming about the characters of his novels in a watercolour painting by Victorian artist, etcher and illustrator Robert William Buss. Picture: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images – Credit: Archant In the 19th century, the […]

Why does the death of a footballer produce such a particular and profound sense of pathos? asks CHARLIE CONNELLY When the aircraft intending to carry 28-year-old Argentinean footballer Emiliano Sala from Nantes to Cardiff disappeared over the English Channel north of Alderney, shock and bewilderment spread throughout the football world. In Nantes, the Breton city […]

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the mysterious death of the sublimely-talented footballer Matthias Sindelar. CHARLIE CONNELLY revisits the tragic story of a true Austrian hero National hero: Matthias Sindelar’s image was used to market watches, milk and yogurt. Photo submitted – Credit: Archant Vienna has always had a strong fascination with death. In […]

After Jonathan Franzen’s puffed-up advice for aspiring writers got a mauling online, CHARLIE CONNELLY offers his own, less pretentious tips. Midwinder – Credit: Archant Jonathan Franzen is a Serious Writer, the sort of Serious Writer who requires capital letters whenever you describe him as a Serious Writer. Most of us are serious writers inasmuch as […]

Ahead of the centenary of the end of the First World War. CHARLIE CONNELLY reconstructs the moving and momentous events of the very first Armistice Day, assembling personal accounts from diaries, newspaper and museum archives. 05:00 Across Europe rain had fallen through the night. In Britain it fell on the towns and cities, villages and […]

Anthea Bell, who died last month, deserves to be remembered as one of the continent’s literary greats, says CHARLIE CONNELLY In Asterix the Legionary, where the eponymous hero and his sidekick Obelix travel to north Africa posing as Roman soldiers, there’s a scene in which the crew of a wrecked pirate ship find themselves stranded […]

After his death in the final week of the First World War Edward Connelly faded from family history, until a chance discovery by CHARLIE CONNELLY. He started to piece together the details of his relative’s short life and, in a powerful act of remembrance, undertook a personal pilgrimage, from the soldier’s place of birth to […]

Johann Sebastian Bach’s trek through Germany to Lubeck is a little known chapter in an extraordinary life. CHARLIE CONNELLY learns more. One evening in the late summer of 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach was walking across the main square in Arnstadt, Thuringia. He was 20 and two years into his job as organist at the Neue […]

​He lived the archetypal life of a poet – intense, eventful and tragic. Yet Friedrich Hölderlin remains an obscure figure outside Germany. A newly-translated work, outlining a momentous existence, could change all that, says CHARLIE CONNELLY What are the key ingredients that make up the classic poet’s life? Is it the wilful excess and general […]

A timely novel which neatly skewers the still-pervasive myth of an idyllic English countryside. As the self-mutilatory repercussions of Brexit become ever clearer and we career with increasing velocity towards leaving the European Union without any kind of negotiated safety net, Leavers are being forced to draw in the boundaries of their fantasy land further […]

​With the football match day programme facing an uncertain future, Charlie Connelly suggests how they could return to their glory days. The Manchester United review. Picture: Archant – Credit: Archant Towards the end of last month I could be found rummaging in boxes and tutting a lot. Afflicted by a sudden bout of nostalgia I’d […]

Charlie Connelly on a book that brings a new level of analysis to the divisive issue on which Ireland is about to decide. Amid the intense national debate surrounding Ireland’s imminent referendum on whether to reform the country’s near-total ban on abortion, one book has emerged to help truly humanise the argument and, perhaps, sway […]

Three decades after the death of Kim Philby, perhaps Britain’s most notorious spy, CHARLIE CONNELLY ponders the changing nature of espionage British spy John Cairncross. Photo: UGC. – Credit: UGC Thirty years ago this week a solemn procession made its way slowly through Moscow’s Kuntsevo cemetery on the banks of the Setun river. An open […]

With chilling talk of a new Cold War, CHARLIE CONNELLY remembers one upside from the last one – gripping fiction Salisbury was, on the face of it, an unlikely setting for a chill blast of stale air from the Cold War to blow through the streets but the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter […]

The savaging that Milo Yiannopoulos’ awful book received at the hands of its editor provided joy for many. But CHARLIE CONNELLY had a very personal, and pressing, reason not to join in the ridicule Just before the turn of the year there was much merriment on social media concerning the manuscript of Milo Yiannopoulos’s memoir […]

STEVE ANGLESEY on how a book of less than 400 words provides the most compelling illustration of why Leave won As the news about Brexit continues to get worse; the writing about it continues to get better. What The Hell Happens Now by Ian Dunt, Tim Shipman’s All-Out War and Unleashing Demons by Craig Oliver […]

In his most celebrated poems, Rupert Brooke gave a classic evocation of England. But, argues CHARLIE CONNELLY, his work has a very European context My copy of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 And Other Poems is a third impression of the first edition that was published in June 1915. The first run had only appeared the previous […]

Britain has never produced another hero like Dan Dare. In a landmark year for the lantern-jawed pilot, CHARLIE CONNELLY pays tribute to a figure who has shaped our art, literature, science, architecture and even musical theatre 2017 is a big year for Dan Dare. Born in 1967, he turns 50 while also marking 50 years […]

Painting Chaucer as a Little Englander, as many have done, does him a disservice. It is time to reclaim the great man from the Brexit tendency, says CHARLIE CONNELLY​ Every year on October 25, the anniversary of Chaucer’s death, I heave my copy of The Riverside Chaucer from the shelves, haul it to the sofa […]

Despite plenty of opportunities being created, when it comes to European sports books, writers are just not putting their chances away, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. If you were to name one book that pricked your interest in Europe, what would it be? Grimms’ Fairy Tales? Pinocchio? the Chalet School books? If I tell you mine, promise […]

Plenty of books create beautiful evocations of the cities in which they are set. But far fewer succeed in elevating their locations from a backdrop into a central character. CHARLIE CONNELLY selects a few. On learning of the death of J.P. Donleavy on September 11 at the age of 91 I eschewed the most appropriate […]

Ahead of the return to London of arguably his greatest work, Glengarry Glen Ross, Charlie Connelly considers the craft of polymath and playwright David Mamet. Al Pacino on the set of Glengarry Glen Ross. Photo: New Line Cinema/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images – Credit: Corbis via Getty Images In the mid-1960s Carol Stoll would sit […]

Jack Kerouac’s drug-fuelled stream of consciousness is 60 years old this month. And while the Beat Generation might now seem like fifties throwbacks, this most celebrated novel could just be the most influential book of the twentieth century, says CHRIS SULLIVAN ‘I read On the Road in maybe 1959,’ wrote quintessential Beatnik Bob Dylan. ‘It […]

All libraries – from the largest to the smallest – are repositories of magic and dreams, linked by the opportunities they represent, says CHARLIE CONNELLY. And we must cherish them Twenty-five years ago this week the Bosnian cellist Vedran Smajlovic sat among the burnt-out ruins of the National Library of Bosnia and began to play. […]

‘Trees are sanctuaries,’ wrote the German author and poet Hermann Hesse. ‘Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.’ Hesse’s words are prime example of how Europe has always attached a vivid mystique to its trees. Myths and legends across the continent are based in […]