Every year, I wonder if I’ll do this again – more than at any time in the history of recorded popular music, perhaps, it seems impossible to select fifty, much less five, albums that mi…| @Number 71
My experience of the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist has been unusually shaped by reviews. For reasons I’ll explore, I came across most of these books first by reputation rather than in the reading. Now, full disclosure: I read a lot of reviews, and I read multiple pieces about each Booker-shortlisted novel every year. This will […]| @Number 71
In the mid-June of 1997, I was in an English Literature class. Our regular teacher was away, and she was being covered for by our Art teacher, whose principal characteristic was his physical resemblance to Gianluca Vialli. He was not an expert on the plays of Arthur Miller. In lieu of critical insight, the class […]| @Number 71
How many literary awards would a literary award award if a literary award could award awards? It’s hard to say, but the answer is probably in the region of “many”. It is hard to begrudge authors this preponderance of gongs: their task can be thankless enough without complaints that there are too many ways in […]| @Number 71
It felt at times as if 2023 was a year in which pop music mattered to the mainstream in a way it hasn’t for a little while: Taylor Swift’s Eras tour led to her being Time‘s person of the year, and to innumerable think pieces and op-eds about her artistic, economic and cultural significance; The […]| @Number 71
There’s a good essay in the current issue of the TLS by Dinah Birch, on the subject of that perennial Victorian Christmas story, A Christmas Carol. Dickens’ self-funded novella was not just part of but helped shape the mid-ninenteenth-century revival of Christmas as a sort of, to use Birch’s words, “retail opportunity.” The contents of […]| @Number 71
There’s a moment in Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting – a novel which stands proud of the rest of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, if only for its bulk, amid the company of what otherwise is a slew of rather slim books – when we flash back to one of the protagonists’ first days at […]| @Number 71
I’ve been reading and writing about the Women’s Prize shortlist for some years now, and in many ways I’ve come to look forward to it more than the Booker. If it comes without the hoop-la and posh bingo paraphernalia that makes watching that prize such fun – and so instructive – then the Women’s Prize […]| @Number 71
When it’s hard to figure out which albums of a given year most stand out from the rest, is it because a year was uncommonly good, or is it because all of its records have bunched together in decent mediocrity? This year, I thought one reason I couldn’t quite tell might have been because I […]| @Number 71
Sherlock Holmes is often characterised – wrongly, in this reader’s opinion – as cold and distant, or aloof and disdainful, or sometimes explicitly sociopathic. But in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” which I read every Christmas Eve, we find all the evidence we need that he was in fact intensely social – or, at […]| @Number 71