Rafael Nadal: king of Paris
There’s something especially poignant about the last days of a tennis champion. The technical brilliance, discipline and will to win remain but the body is much less accommodating
May 8 2025 / The New Statesman
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.