Visions of apocalypse, once confined to science fiction, now dominate mainstream films and novels.
21st July 2003 / New Statesman
Europe’s nearest approximation to a classless society, but what secrets lurk in the dark?
16th December 2002 / New Statesman
Dr Bloch had an interesting story to tell. He had known Hitler at first hand; nearly forty years before he had been the Hitler family's doctor.
1st October 2002 / Granta, 79
Those who voted for Le Pen belong to a generation which, in the words of one writer, "knows that pleasure is the opposite of happiness". Jason Cowley on a nation's cultural emptiness.
5th June 2002 / New Statesman
A nation reckons with its past: who remembers the two million Germans who died after the war ended?
27th March 2002 / The Guardian
Interpreting the US terrorist attacks through Immanuel Kant, Francis Fukuyama and Tony Blair.
15th October 2001 / New Statesman
No writer had been more adept at exploiting postmodern ideas of the instability of the self and the slippage between autobiography and fiction, but this time it seemed as though Roth had reached a terminus, the point at which his stylised self-obsession had become a poetics of despair.
July 2001 / Atlantic Monthly; Prospect, Issue 65
A country of deep divisions
11th March 2001 / The Independent
In 1977, the forces of the New Right and punk rock were agitating to transform Britain
30th October 2000 / New Statesman
It used to be said that if you wanted to discover someone’s religion in Glasgow, you simply asked which football team they supported
27th August 2000 / The Independent
The new Oresund bridge uniting Sweden and Denmark is an icon of science and modernity - and a powerful symbol of the onward march to a borderless Europe
31st January 2000 / New Statesman
Into the lower depths of the city
1st January 1999 / New Statesman
The Great War lives on vividly in poems now the 80th anniversary of the armistice has triggered a new publishing boom. But do books bring us closer to the truth, asks Jason Cowley.
8th November 1998 / The Sunday Times
The Russian Booker Prize has galvanised writers to produce controversial winners. Jason Cowley reports.
11th December 1997 / The Times
Francis Stuart, one of Ireland’s finest living writers, spent the last war in Berlin writing scripts for Lord Haw Haw. Jason Cowley visits the 94 year old writer in his Dublin bungalow and considers the relationship between great art and brutal politics in the lives of Stuart, Céline and Knut Hamsun.
February 1997 / Prospect, Issue 16