John Banville

Enigmatic Roger Casement

Roger Casement became internationally celebrated for exposing the horrors of colonialism, yet he remains an elusive figure.

‘Live All You Can’

The early lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James were marked by the loss of loved ones, and in their reflections one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

Special Correspondent

As a public man, John le Carré was a model of probity and rectitude; in his private life, he was not above double-dealing.

‘A God Can Do It’

For Rilke, the artist’s task is to absorb the realm of things and thereby transform it into something rich and strange.

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

An Affair to Remember

Julia Parry has mined a trove of inherited letters to write her marvelous, gently elegiac book about the love affair between Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House.

Sold!

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

No One Gets Out Alive

A Master of Hidden Things

Of Terrorists, Tourists, and Robert Frost

What Made the Old Boys Turn?

Oscar’s Mum

The Impossibility of Being Oscar

He had, throughout his life, talked away too much of his talent.

Tender Is the Fall

Ending at the Beginning

‘Kafka: The Early Years’ completes one of the great literary biographies of our time

Life as a Burning House

The Strange Genius of the Master

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”