The Monad Unchained

Blame it on the Boogeyman

The Devouring Mind

Making Us Good

I’m Dangerous, Me

Shriver’s irritation: a pose that doesn’t add up to a set of ideas

Cancelling Mailer

Norman Mailer meets the ‘fierce ladies’ and irretrievably loses the plot

Tell us a Story

The pursuit of fictive pleasure: on not getting Fernando Pessoa

Beyond A Joke

A Tale Told by an Idiot: Jordan Peterson’s daring fictional gambit

The Cat Laughs

Are we, like our feline companions, creatures of biology and chance?

Seigneur Moments

Martin Amis’s work can be understood as a series of riffs on the base elements of male friendship: rivalry, companionship, sublimated desire. The bullshit quotient…

Then Again

Politics has become a pageant of scandals, with high moral dudgeon the preferred rhetorical mode. In flight from uncertainty, we have abjured the ethical obligation…

Talk about a Revolution

Smash the system or read books: the tough academic choice

Who Will Save Us?

As ‘end of the world’ scenarios assume increasing plausibility, the canonisation of Greta Thunberg becomes completely intelligible. It’s just one of myriad ways in which…

Triumph of the Will

Benjamin Moser’s biography tells us vividly what it was like to know Susan Sontag: it was a tough gig. But it doesn’t tell us what…

The Botplot

Ian McEwan’s novels tend to set up a clash between opposing worldviews, with the authorial thumb pressed heavily on one side of the scales. His…

Hating Jonathan Franzen

Privileged, pretentious, arrogant, self-indulgent, mediocre, male, white. Those who dislike Franzen certainly don’t hold back. Is it the writing, or that he serves as a…

Channelling God

In 1954 Norman Mailer discovered marijuana. It gave him an insight into the mind of the Almighty, which it turned out was quite a lot…

Team Amis

To be accepted into Martin Amis’s canon of greats you must be a writer, not necessarily of brilliant novels, or even of brilliant chapters, but…