Like Life
Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel focuses on a fictional biographer’s attempt to write the life of an author who strongly resembles the notoriously highhanded V.S. Naipaul.
Lost And Found
Re-creating the hike taken by Sebald that inspired his masterpiece, ‘The Rings of Saturn,’ Edward Platt meditates on the late novelist’s particular genius.
Enigma
Before she died, she was hailed as England’s greatest living writer, but she had a hard road getting there—at one point she even lived on a freezing, leaky barge.
Life Studies
If you had one year to live, how would you spend it? That’s a question most of us wouldn’t know how to answer but for one British publisher and translator it was easy: to translate Tolstoy’s great story about a dying man, “The Death of Ivan Illyich.”
Romantics
One of the greatest travel books ever published, the late Patrick Leigh Fermor’s two-volumes of his walk across Europe in the 1930s, is finally finished.
Off the Beaten Path
The hideout of a beloved fictional hero inspired two great travel writers to the hunt. By Edward Platt.
From helping identify Ebola to leading the charge against AIDS, Peter Piot has been on the pandemic frontlines.
The discovery of a body on the queen’s estate gets her year off to a bad start, writes Edward Platt in London.
Two incidents of alleged racism in English soccer have shocked the sport, writes Edward Platt in London.