A game of madness

I’ve never paid particular attention to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s famous London churches, although I am familiar with some of them. I … More

One face in a thousand

In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined … More

Worlds and authorities

I was spurred by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Northern Lights to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, … More

The magic of the real

My introduction to fantasy fiction was The Lord of the Rings, which I encountered surprisingly early, while visiting a friend … More

Energy and entertainment

My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after … More

A trajectory

General relativity tells us something enticing about time. It doesn’t tell us what many would like it to tell us, … More

For the readers

There’s something wonderful about being immersed in the world of a book, something which for me is even more pronounced … More

Veils of allusion

Iain Sinclair walks London’s sacred geometries, pursuing a dérive that moves obliquely across the familiar, prosaic territories of the city. … More

Ruthlessly imagined

It’s very unusual for me to read a recently published novel, much less a prize-winning one. This is mainly because … More

Impossible speech

I have a pet theory. I would like to articulate it eventually through a scholarly monograph, but for the moment … More

Migratory death-drives

Emigration seems to offer a fresh start, a blank slate; this is often what is hoped for by those that … More

A few wooden buildings

Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but … More

The book closed, the world continues

The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling … More

A cautionary elegy

William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard … More