The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
Week one: the storytellerThis is a ghost story, so we start with the storyteller. Literary critics rarely use this last term, preferring to talk of the "narrator". But when it comes to hauntings this traditional description is fitting. Arthur Kipps is ...
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt
Tony Judt's last book is an admirable assessment of intellectuals and politics in the last centuryIn this marvellous book, two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent w...
John Mullan’s 10 of the best: erotic dreams
From Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to a rooftop encounter in Thomas Pynchon's V, here are some of the most memorable erotic dreams in literatureThe Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser"… by my side a royall Mayd / Her daintie limbes full softly down did ...
Jacqueline Rose: a life in writing
'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies besid...
My father the superhero
A first marathon attempt at 58 years old wasn't enough. He had to run the entire distance wearing a cape. Then again, Michael Cox has never done things by halves"DO YOU WANT TO WATCH ME RUN AROUND THE FIELD?" said my dad (who is in the top 10 loudest m...
Raw Material by Derek Mahon – review
Mahon's translations and reworkings contain some welcome surprisesPoetry is what is gained in translation, wrote Joseph Brodsky, inverting Robert Frost's more pessimistic view. It can happen: Edgar Allan Poe's poems are notably improved in Baudela...
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
Asperger's syndrome is dealt with sensitively in a 10-year-old's storyTen-year-old Caitlin Smith is doubly bereaved. Two years ago her mother died of cancer; now her beloved older brother Devon has been randomly murdered in a shooting at their American...
Et cetera: non-fiction roundup – reviews
Roland Barthes' Travels in China, Enjoy Every Sandwich by Lee Lipsenthal and Screw Business As Usual by Richard BransonTravels in China, by Roland Barthes (Polity, £16.99)Rummaging around in deceased writers' drawers for material they never wanted to ...
The Faith of the Faithless by Simon Critchley
Variations on the theme of a secular religionAt the end of his previous book, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying, Simon Critchley wrote: "If morality becomes a question, as it is on BBC Radio 4, of nicely educated people with shrill voices making ch...
Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean
He had the world at his paws, and earned $1,000 a weekThe creature at the centre of this remarkable book is an enigma. We never really know what he is thinking, and in fact he may not think at all, in the ratiocinatory sense. Susan Orlean presents to u...
