Articles
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Pedigree by Georges Simenon
Book reviewed by Patrick Marnham
Pedigree by Georges Simenon (Trans. by Robert Baldick, with Introduction by Luc Sante) New York Review Books pp.544, $17.95. “I was born in the dark and in the rain and I got away. The crimes I write about are the…
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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
One morning in January 1993, a terrible fire broke out in a house in the French region of Gex, near the Swiss border. The house was occupied by Dr Jean-Claude Romand, a medical researcher who worked in Geneva at the…
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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…
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Eric Boissenot, the Magician 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 city of Bordeaux stands on the banks of the Gironde, a broad Atlantic estuary that drains and cools what is probably the most celebrated wine growing region in the world. Running north from the city, along the left bank…
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The Masque of Africa
Glimpses of African Belief by VS Naipaul
Africa is the setting for several of VS Naipaul’s finest fictional stories - In a Free State , A Bend in the River , Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear,…
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The Royal Society of Literature
How the leader of a Twitter mob became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
On December 6, 2023, a ‘serious incident’ occurred at the Royal Society of Literature. The director of the RSL cancelled publication of the society’s annual Review when it was about to go to press, and fired its editor, Maggie Fergusson.…