Thomas Bernhard’s fiction of the meaningless
His work was powered by bile and dread, but the Austrian novelist found laughter in the dark.
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Little women writ large
A new film of the American classic asks whether grown women can retain the spirited independence of their girlhood. It’s…
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Educating Rembrandt
In the city of Leiden, the budding artist was surrounded with industrious craftsmen, freethinking printers and cutting-edge science
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How loneliness became an epidemic
Social isolation is a growing modern phenomenon. But can we treat it as a disease?
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The crimes of Jean Genet
He was a child outlaw who embraced his own “evil” in search of an authentic life. But society turned Genet’s…
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Edna O’Brien: “Some men like fairly trivial women”
The 88-year-old writer on truth-telling, the Irish backstop and the elusive “love object” that has haunted her life.
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The Reinvention of Humanity: how women created anthropology
A new book explains that women pioneered the study of other cultures.
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Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat: gently rambling, lightly polemical non-fiction
This more-ish book is best, if inadequately, described as a biography of Samuel-Jean Pozzi, the French gynaecologist. Pozzi is well…
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