Limelight’s shadow
A neuroscientist by trade, Rachel Genn draws from a deep well of jargon to fill her novel What You Could Have Won. The two words that stick in my head for much of the time I’m reading it aren’t too obscure: Toxicity and Tragedy. It’s no wonder: the novel’s main character Astrid spends a good...
Through a mirror darkly
Well before Shakespeare made the feeling into one of the most celebrated tenets of art as well as life, the Greeks had already been there and done that. The principle of “all the world’s a stage” was for them the clearest, most perfect prism through which to analyse the full, multi-hued spectrum of human experience,...
Tickled pink, black and blue
When Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 with The Finkler Question, there was much debate and discussion about humour in novels and how this was the first time a comic book had won the prize. What nonsense! In my experience, all the best books contain humour. This is, of course, an exaggeration,...
