Why boxing is a beautiful sickness

​Donald McRae’s The Last Bell: a study in obsession and a sad farewell to the fight game

March 16 2025 / The Sunday Times

Keir Starmer: The anti-politics politician

​The Labour leader is utterly ruthless but what does he want to do with power?

February 9 2025 / The Sunday Times

Robert Kaplan: A pessimist's guide to the future

​The American journalist supported the Iraq war - until he watched the carnage unfold. Now he advocates a policy of “tragic realism” for our chaotic era

January 19 2025 / The Sunday Times

Paul Collier: ​Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places

​Nether left nor right but occupying the “hard centre”

June 16 2024 / The Sunday Times

Andy Beckett: The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies

London is not Britain

May 5 2024 / The Observer

Ramsay MacDonald and The Wild Men of Labour

How the first Labour government - of 1924 - shattered the old political order

January 21 2024 / The Sunday Times

Shaktar Donetsk: The Barcelona of the East

​As war rages in Ukraine, the football club that is “more than a club”

October 1 2023 / The Sunday Times

David Runciman: The Handover

AI, the Hobbesian state and the professor who wants to be a big picture thinker

September 10 2023 / The Sunday Times

Patrick Deneen: Regime Change

​What comes after liberalism?

July 16 2023 / The Sunday Times

Wes Streeting: Memoir

From an East End council flat to Westminster: Labour’s rising star

July 2 2023 / The Sunday Times

James Graham: Dear England

James Graham is fast becoming our national playwright - for these troubled modern times, at least

June 28 2023 / The New Statesman

Tim Burrows: The homecoming

​The search for the soul of a misunderstood English county

June 4 2023 / The Sunday Times

Edinburgh: back in a city of ordered formality and grandeur

Chairing the judges of the Baillie Gifford winner of winners’ award and a case of mistaken identity

May 3 2023 / The New Statesman

Bryan Magee: The Restless Philosopher, an interview

The last interview - an audio long read

April 9 2023 / The New Statesman

Mark Hollis: Inside the walled garden

​A biographer searches for the mysterious former Talk Talk frontman who created music of beauty and grace

May 4 2022 / The New Statesman

How the New Romantics Transformed British Culture

As Margaret Thatcher’s political revolution unfolded, a group of style-obsessed misfits brightened troubled times.

October 28 2020 / New Statesman

National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy by Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell

An age of upheaval

October 21 2018 / Sunday Times

Kraftwerk: tomorrow's world yesterday

​The pioneering “futurists” play the Royal Albert Hall, London

June 30 2017 / New Statesman

King Lear: Anthony Sher at the Barbican

​Between tragedy and farce

November 23 2016 / New Statesman

Here I Am, by Jonathan Safran Foer

​Overconfident and under-imagined: an extravagant mess of a book

September 17 2016 / Financial Times

Citizen Clem: a biography of Attlee, by John Bew

Clement Attlee’s progressive patriotism

September 3 2016 / Financial Times

Housman Country: Into the heart of England, by Peter Parker

The impossibility of love

August 19 2016 / Financial Times

Zero K, by Don DeLillo

​The end of times

May 13 2016 / Financial Times

Comrade Corbyn, by Rosa Prince

​Jeremy Corbyn seems to be trapped in a perpetual adolescence

February 14 2016 / The Sunday Times

The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad

London: a city of secrets and spies

February 14 2016 / BBC Radio 4, A Good Read

Promised You a Miracle, 1980-82, by Andy Beckett

​A “nearly history” of the 1980s, Britain’s decade of boom, bust and Margaret Thatcher.

September 14 2015 / New Statesman

Clive James: Sense of an Ending

How Clive James found his defining subject, the gravest of all.

August 14 2015 / Financial Times

Antigone: Juliette Binoche at the Barbican

Juliette Binoche is alluring but impenetrable.

March 2015 / The New Statesman

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel for a decade is, on one level, a complete surprise.

February 27 2015 / Financial Times

David Marquand: An Essay on Britain, Now

He has written a self-consciously provocative book, one that demands to be read.

May 23 2014 / Financial Times

Wilfred Owen, by Guy Cuthbertson

Cuthbertson’s Wilfred Owen is a fan’s biography. It is ardent, dreamy and at times a touch swooning.

February 28 2014 / Financial Times

The Kraus Project, by Jonathan Franzen

A writer who self-consciously craves fame and the world’s applause, Jonathan Franzen is also simultaneously repelled by it.

October 4 2013 / Financial Times

Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth: A masterful portrayal of a murderer

The Kenneth Branagh/Rob Ashford production of Macbeth for the Manchester International Festival presents an enthralling portrait of sickening, desire-fuelled ambition.

July 8 2013 / New Statesman

F Scott Fitzgerald: Careless people

“There never was a good biography of a good novelist,” F Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notebooks.

June 14 2013 / Financial Times

Aleksandar Hemon: From Sarajevo to Chicago

Essays on occupying the space in between cultures.

March 29 2013 / Financial Times

Claire Foy and James McAvoy: Macbeth at Trafalgar Studios

The last king of Scotland.

March 7 2013 / New Statesman

George Osborne: the Austerity Chancellor

A biographer awestruck by his subject.

October 25 2012 / New Statesman

David Foster Wallace: The Infinite Quest

Though tortured by isolation and his fastidious intellect, David Foster Wallace produced work that will endure.

September 14 2012 / Financial Times

Duncan Hamilton: More than a game

How football, the working man’s passion, united a father and son.

August 24 2012 / Financial Times

Richard Ford: In the big country

The intrigue of Canada, this novel of crime and punishment, is not what happens and when but how and why.

June 2 2012 / Financial Times

Tiger Woods: The Big Miss

When Hank Haney declares that Tiger Woods is the “human being who’s fallen faster than anyone else in history”, you forgive the hyperbole because he speaks as a sportsman.

May 16 2012 / New Statesman

Pico Iyer: Looking for Graham Greene

In his meditation on Graham Greene, the author reflects on his own journey.

May 5 2012 / Financial Times

Christopher Hitchens: the war on error

Christopher Hitchens’ fierce certainties make for fine polemic but they have often obscured reality.

September 23 2011 / Financial Times

Edward Thomas: Now All Roads Lead to France

Matthew Hollis pays tribute to Edward Thomas, the first world war poet who immortalised the beauty of England.

August 6 2011 / Financial Times

Alan Hollinghurst: The Stranger's Child

The setting of The Stranger’s Child feels immediately familiar, as do the ironies – elegant people partying on the edge of the abyss.

June 24 2011 / Financial Times

VS Naipaul: A late African journey

At its best, V S Naipaul’s Masque of Africa is marked by moments of startling clarity and insight.

September 6 2010 / New Statesman

Solar by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan excels at climate science but his one-dimensional protagonist makes you shudder.

March 14 2010 / The Observer

Philip Roth: The Humbling

Sex, death, loneliness, old age: yes, it’s another Roth novel. But this time, is the great American.

October 29 2009 / The Observer

Jay McInerney: Twilight of the Manhattan gods

Jay McInerney’s bright lights may have been dimmed but sex in the city remains a constant source of satire, writes Jason Cowley.

January 11 2009 / The Observer

Malcolm Gladwell: The Outlier

In investigating what sets geniuses apart, is Malcolm Gladwell also asking what makes him so special, wonders Jason Cowley.

November 23 2008 / The Observer

Philip Roth: Outrage from beyond the grave

Sex and death are once again the central preoccupations of Philip Roth’s latest novel, a poignant addition to his rich late period.

September 14 2008 / The Observer

Haruki Murakami: What he thinks about when he thinks about running

Haruki Murakami runs miles every day to keep fit for writing. Here he combines his two loves.

August 10 2008 / The Observer

Jhumpa Lahiri: Unaccustomed Earth

Lahiri is presently probably the most influential writer of fiction in America.

June 9 2008 / Financial Times

George Simenon: Tainted Love

For writers of colonial fiction, Africa held a dark erotic attraction, even if the message underlying their work was that Europeans have no place there.

June 1 2008 / New Statesman

Philip Roth: Zuckerman's last stand

No matter which name Philip Roth chooses for his narrators or fictional alter egos, whether it is Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh or indeed even, slyly, Philip Roth, they invariably share many of the same urgent preoccupations.

October 20 2007 / Financial Times

Mario Vargas Llosa: Engaged and sincere

Before our meeting, I had considered him to be something of a poseur and dilettante, a self-styled Great Man, in the classic Latin American model.

April 16 2007 / New Statesman

Peter Godwin: the white boy returns

Peter Godwin’s desire to chronicle the breakdown of Zimbabwe in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, suffers from his reluctance to spend time in the country he calls home

March 4 2007 / The Observer

Yasunari Kawabata: The Master of Funerals

The last sigh of the dying world of old imperial Japan

August 21 2006 / New Statesman

Christina Lamb: Zimbabwe in black and white

Christina Lamb tells the true story of a white farmer and his black servant before and after Mugabe in her illuminating and flawed House of Stone, says Jason Cowley.

May 14 2006 / The Observer

Who or what is Massive Attack?

Jason Cowley traces the career of the troubled, unique collective that changed the face of British dance music.

March 27 2006 / New Statesman

Michel Houellebecq: Existentialist crisis

If interest in Houellebecq’s life and work remains inexorable, this is because, in many ways, the life is inextricable from the work.

November 7 2005 / New Statesman

Kate Bush: Aerial

She’s still deep, if occasionally unfathomable. Jason Cowley delights in an alchemist’s return.

October 16 2005 / The Observer

Salman Rushdie: From here to Kashmir

Salman Rushdie vividly explores our post-9/11 world in Shalimar the Clown, says Jason Cowley.

September 11 2005 / The Observer

WG Sebald: Notes from a time traveller

WG Sebald’s last book, Campo Santo, offers further proof of his rare gift for tackling Germany’s pain, says Jason Cowley.

May 27 2005 / The Observer

The Fight by Norman Mailer

The leading character in Mailer’s thrilling account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing championship in Kinshasa - the Rumble in the Jungle - is not Muhammad Ali, as you would expect, or even his ferocious rival George Foreman, then thought by many to be unbeatable. It is not Don King… No, the main character is Norman Mailer, naturally enough.

May 8 2005 / The Observer

Philip Roth: The terror of the unforeseen

In portraying individual lives tethered to the forces of history, Philip Roth’s new novel revisits the themes of previous work. But it also reveals an unexpectedly benign and forgiving side, writes Jason Cowley.

October 11 2004 / New Statesman

WF Deedes: The long view

I had once been scornful of Deedes, whom I imagined to be the personification of Conservative Man, but of late I had begun to read his journalism—columns, despatches from sub-Saharan Africa, countryside diaries—with intensifying respect and admiration.

July 26 2004 / New Statesman

Douglas Coupland: Prophet of doom

Ideal for the MTV generation, Douglas Coupland’s fiction is becoming increasingly dark.

September 8 2003 / New Statesman

Michel Houellebecq: Postcard from the edge

Michel Houellebecq’s Lanzarote portrays the author’s unheroic struggle against ennui.

July 28 2003 / New Statesman

James Wood: The monk of metaphor

James Wood, Britain’s most brilliant literary critic, has published a novel. Can the merciless arbiter live up to his own critical standards?

April 2003 / Prospect, Issue 85

Donna Tartt: The second coming

After more than a decade of silence, Donna Tartt is back with a new novel that draws on her childhood in the American South. Jason Cowley on the secret of her success.

October 28 2002 / New Statesman

George Walden: Beau Brummell, the last dandy

Walden, in his desire for the curious story of the life and death of Beau Brummell to become more widely known, has gone ahead and translated Barbey himself. First, however, he offers his own thoughts on dandyism in an entertaining introductory essay.

October 21 2002 / George Walden: Beau Brummell, the last dandy

John Lanchester: In search of lost time

John Lanchester’s powers of pastiche remain undiminished in his new novel, Fragrant Harbour.

June 30 2002 / The Observer

Gerhard Richter:The saviour of painting?

Gerhard Richter at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

May 6 2002 / New Statesman

JM Coetzee: Back to the future

Coetzee’s gloomy hero questions life’s meaning in his new novel Youth, but to little purpose.

April 21 2002 / The Observer

Alexandra Fuller: African and white

A memoir from Alexandra Fuller and a study from Martin Meredith give a timely and frightening reminder of Zimbabwe’s descent into anarchy.

February 24 2002 / The Observer

Julian Barnes: The Ironist

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.

January 6 2002 / The Observer

Helena Drysdale: Still looking for George

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.

November 19 2001 / New Statesman

Bjork: Emotional landscapes

Jason Cowley on why Bjork’s voice is like an icepick to the heart.

September 17 2001 / New Statesman

How the dead live

More and more novelists are appropriating real-life characters and the events of history for fictional ends. Why? Jason Cowley on the art of literary grave-robbing.

December 4 2000 / New Statesman

Otto Weininger: The duty of genius

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.

August 21 2000 / New Statesman

F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby at 75

75 years after The Great Gatsby, Jason Cowley remembers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed youth.

April 8 2000 / The Guardian

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen: a patrician against the Nazis

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.

March 6 2000 / New Statesman

Peter Gay: Stolen identity

Peter Gay, the distinguished American cultural historian, has long been haunted by thoughts of a shadow life.

January 24 2000 / New Statesman

Brigitte Hamann: Hitler's Vienna

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”.

April 26 1999 / New Statesman

Bruno Schulz: Murdered promise

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.

February 12 1999 / New Statesman

Ian McEwan: Amsterdam

Ian McEwan is a dualist: he divides the world into conflicting opposites and makes fiction from the sparks thrown up by their collision.

September 19 1998 / The Times