Reviews
A memoir from Alexandra Fuller and a study from Martin Meredith give a timely and frightening reminder of Zimbabwe’s descent into anarchy.
Julian Barnes’s love affair with France is based on a wilful fantasy. Jason Cowley detects a taint of vanity publishing in this collection of recycled journalism, Something to Declare.
Modern travel writing is in crisis, too often no more than an indulgence of ego. But the books of Helena Drysdale have a rare difference.
Jason Cowley on why Bjork’s voice is like an icepick to the heart.
A misogynist and anti-Semite, the philosopher Otto Weininger was obsessed by decay. Jason Cowley on the brief life and work of a disturbed icon of Vienna.
75 years after The Great Gatsby, Jason Cowley remembers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed youth.
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen never forgave himself for not murdering Hitler when he had the chance. Jason Cowley reads the fascinating war diaries of an aristocrat and pessimist.
Peter Gay, the distinguished American cultural historian, has long been haunted by thoughts of a shadow life.
The Vienna through which Hitler wandered in his youth was a melting pot of decadent turmoil, the capital of an empire in decline - a “research laboratory for world destruction”.
To read the fiction and correspondence of Bruno Schulz, knowing that he was murdered by the Nazis, is a bit like watching footage of passengers board a plane that later crashed: you long to warn him of the dangers ahead.
Ian McEwan is a dualist: he divides the world into conflicting opposites and makes fiction from the sparks thrown up by their collision.