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Tessa Hadley: ‘Uneasy books are good in uneasy times’

Tessa Hadley: ‘Uneasy books are good in uneasy times’

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov My earliest reading memory I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted. My favourite book growing up One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly. Continue reading...

Small talk: a bluffer’s guide

Small talk: a bluffer’s guide

Dread the thought of party chat? This selection of cultural keypoints will put some fizz in your conversation It seemed Trump had finally dealt with domestic terrorist Jimmy Kimmel after his chat show was briefly cancelled, but now it’s back on air. So should we expect more censorship? Surely South Park is skating on thin ice by mocking the president and his allegedly inadequate penis? Maybe the president will throw a curveball and declare a nature show about squirrels to be a secret antifa recruitment operation? Or perhaps he will simply cut the niceties and just put Oprah Winfrey up on Showtrial (“Ratings like you’ve never seen before!”)? Continue reading...