Books

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 […]

The epitaph for the Battle of Passchendaele – as with so much of our understanding of the First World War – came from a British war poet. But what of their German counterparts? We explore the poetry that emerged from the other side of no-man’s land ‘I died in hell,/ (They called it Passchendaele),’ wrote […]

Not quite ready to laugh about Brexit? This 1960s comic classic brilliantly captures a sense of the undeniable farce the referendum vote has triggered A post shared by Vinylcollection (@vinylhoard) on Mar 5, 2017 at 4:17am PST The comic novel is one of the hardest things in literature to get right. Indeed, when you consider […]

A victim of bad timing and Nazi disapproval meant the curiously-titled Schlump vanished into obscurity. But it has been recently re-evaluated and its anonymous author unmasked. Hans Herbert Grimm – Credit: Archant Alone In Berlin opened in British cinemas last week starring Brendan Gleeson and Emma Thompson as the working class couple Otto and Anna […]

Forget Harry Potter mania – fan fever for Goethe’s tragic hero Werther was blamed for copycat tragedies and popularising yellow trousers This time 243 years ago, in an attic room at his family home in Frankfurt, 23-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was sitting at a high desk scribbling away frantically in a sustained fit of […]

A look ahead to what will be a big – possibly the biggest yet – year for books from and around the continent When you think about European literature a couple of things might come to mind. Sprawling Russian epics the size of house bricks, maybe, whose list of aristocratic characters alone could fill a […]

The aftermath of the global financial crisis set in motion an Uprising of the Losers. But what comes next?