January darkness was enveloping the northern hemisphere when the Icelandic trawler Mávur (‘Seagull’) left Reykjavik on its journey towards the southern tip of Greenland and then Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, with the intention of returning with a hold full of redfish. Mission accomplished, the
Robespierre foresaw his own execution – realising it would an inevitable consequence of the bloodlust the French Revolution unleashed. In her biographical history, Craveri asks whether seven young noblemen, chosen for their liberal leanings, could have foreseen the consequences for the monarchy an
Another book about the Holocaust? Well, yes, but this book is not just about what happened during the Second World War, what unspeakable atrocities were committed and how brutally people’s lives were either torn to pieces or ripped from them. It is also about what happened before those atrocities
The literary map is full of iconic writers virtually unknown to the English-speaking world. In Norway, Inger Hagerup is considered one of our finest twentieth-century poets, with more than twenty publications under her belt, but the very nature of her work seems to have made it all but untranslatabl
Their influence on crime novels and cinema has been prodigious – so why isn’t the critical stock of Boileau & Narcejac higher? When Alfred Hitchcock saw the effect on audiences of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (‘The Fiends’) (1955), he realised that this Hitchcockian French f
To say that Michel Bussi’s After the Crash made a considerable mark is to understate the case. The highly original premise had critics seeking new adjectives to praise this narrative of the tragic aftermath of a plane crash. Black Water Lilies, however, is a very different kettle of fish, invo
