Articles
Pedigree by Georges Simenon
“I was born in the dark and in the rain and I got away. The crimes I write about are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away”. In this celebrated phrase – from an interview with the New Yorker – the novelist Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, dramatised his own life with a characteristic mixture of self-congratulation and false modesty. But Simenon was not just shooting a line.
Journey to the end of the night
A French doctor lived a life of extraordinary deceit for almost 20 years and then killed his parents, his wife and children
The Adversary: a true story of murder and deception by Emmanuel Carrere (translated by Linda Coverdal
Reviewed in the New Statesman by Patrick Marnham on 29 January 2001
Death in Venice – 2009
VENICE IN AUGUST. The coaches are stacking up by the multi-storey parks on Piazzale Roma; the cut-price flights are rolling into Marco Polo; the cruise ships heave in and out, rounding the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, reducing a former imperial capital to the scale of Toy Town. With the annual rate of visitors running at 20 million, the daily tourist total in August must approach 100,000 – while the resident population halves to about 30,000. This is the month to avoid. The police have to impose a one-way pedestrian traffic system over the Rialto Bridge.
The Margician of Lamarque
An Interview with Eric Boissenot, oenologist of the Medoc and advisor to Latour, Mouton Rothschild, Léoville-Barton, Chateau Talbot and Chateau Palmer.
The Masque of Africa
Glimpses of African Belief by VS Naipaul
The account of one man’s journey… personal themes include the love of helpless animals, the loathing of garbage and exasperation with the constant demands for more money. But for most of the narrative VS Naipaul is on good behaviour. He wants to give irrationality a fair chance, in place of mockery he wants to understand.
Royal Society of Literature
How the leader of a Twitter mob became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature