Bookslut: Less racy than the name suggests, a good book-centric blog, strong on links.[…]

Searle’s gone and done it again. Finding little or nothing to criticize in the two concurrent Bill Viola shows in London (the Haunch of Venison one is over now, I think), Adrian Searle decides to lay into the critical texts around the work (the[…]

Everyone has a secret love in art, and mine is horses and dogs, hunting scenes and other nostagic anglophilia (more Byron then the Beatles. Taking that in mind, Christie’s “Sporting Art” Auction, to be held at London in the next cou[…]

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My interest in old adventure fiction continues to grow with a rediscovery of a pile of John Buchan books I’d been given for Christmas years ago and turned my nose up at. I thought I’d kick off with The Thirty-Nine Steps, but I couldn&#821[…]

Ooh, book within a book. The Land Of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll is a novel about a novelist. Or at least a novel about the writing of a biography of a fictional children’s author Marshall France. It is a slight pity that the version I read was […]

Deception by Philip Roth
There’s something impressive yet still insubstantial in Roth’s work that is at its peak in this very slight book. I’ve read just about everything he wrote, and enjoyed them, but I’ve never been quite c[…]

Borderliners by Peter Hoeg
I hope any Hoeg fans of my acquaintance who are writing books about school rebellions have read this, as that’s what it’s about. Specifically, three odd kids in an experimental school in 1969, trying to understa[…]

It’s rare, disappointingly so, to find a poet who loves language, not in a fetishistic or clever or simply musical way, but robustly, lip-smackingly, instinctually. I saw Keith Bennett read last night, and he struck me as one of the few. Readin[…]

BEDROOM SECRETS FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE: Something I really enjoy doing is reading aloud to Isabel – it’s good practise for probably the only aspect of childrearing I’ll be any good at, and it’s fun introducing her to favourites […]