Latest Blogs
The Inspector Returns
Penguin books has embarked on a programme to republish all 75 of George Simenon’s Maigret novels. Will the phlegmatic Parisian policeman captivate a new generation?
Ten years since the big bang
In May 2004 ten new members, including eight from central and eastern Europe, joined the European Union. Have the effects of this major expansion on the union’s capacity to define what it is been entirely positive?
The Friar in Hell
Some people think you can say anything you like about priests. While others don’t. In the fourteenth century, if Chaucer was anything to go by, there wasn’t much you couldn’t say.
In love with Europe
Those condemned to spend their lives under grey northern skies can understandably harbour deep longings for the Mediterranean. But there is little reason to think Europe’s current headaches will be cured just by knocking back a few beakers full of the warm south.
Eat the frail
New Labour and others enthusiastically embraced a model of society which relegated many people to the margins while embracing and celebrating the buccaneer virtues. We have seen where that got us. Is it too late for the left to think again?
Not yet heaven, not quite hell
First of all you knew you were going to one place or the other. Then along came purgatory. Why it was required is a complex matter, but for heavy work under ground they knew they were going to need the Irish.
The writer cast out
Adam Thirlwell wishes us to contemplate the writer as great soul, cast out of bourgeois society for his compulsion for truth-telling. But the examples he chooses seem a little strange.
Jacques Le Goff 1924-2014
France’s greatest medievalist, and one of Europe’s leading historians, has died after a life filled with achievement, aged ninety.
A Greek sacrifice
The Greeks have been asked to liberalise book prices, a move which publishing and cultural interests in both Germany and France see as inimical to the long-term health of the book sector.
Le livre est mort. Vive le livre
It would be naive to think that new media do not have an eroding effect on old, but traditional forms of reading are not dead yet.
First Catch Your Fairy Godmother
The London Review of Books is a marvel. Cool design, sharp opinion, cosmopolitan style, intellectual depth. How does it do it? Money.
Auden on good and evil
Doing good is all very well, but best to keep it to one’s self. Being good is a more slippery matter still, and the good man often shares a bed with the bad one.