Lockdown

Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their

For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed. Fans of

The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive state control or may fail without hope of public rescue. Not everyone will share those values. But I think everyone should accept that it’s proved catastrophic that those values have apparently disappeared from public policy. History rhymes, but does not repeat itself. The lessons of previous periods when major economic policies of an interventionist sort

The Vulnerables represents Sigrid Nunez’s foray into pandemic literature, a genre we can only expect to see grow in the coming years. The topic is handled with a level of absurdity, making elements of the story eerily (and sometimes traumatically) recognisable. Nunez’s musings on how writing can represent the strangeness of life are never more poignant than when she reflects on the ‘uncertain spring’ of 2020. You’d think she was inventing it if you hadn’t been there yourself. The question of how to write when life is stranger than fiction is at the centre of the book. ‘More and more, fictional story-telling is coming across as beside the point,’ she

Set over the course of the same April day, with morning, afternoon and night ascribed to consecutive years, Michael Cunningham’s Day is built around time’s march towards an inevitable ending. This feeling of being caught up in time and trapped by its onward force is shared by the novel’s small cast of characters. A married couple, Isabel and Dan Byrne, along with Isabel’s brother Robbie, are struggling with their floundering careers, ageing bodies and their place in the world. They are also balancing a painful platonic love triangle, with both Dan and Isabel more in love with Robbie than with each other. The claustrophobic domesticity of the novel is amplified

Generations of readers of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series have enjoyed the books without having to contemplate the erotic properties of the canine member of the quintet. After reading Nicholas Royle’s one-of-a-kind fantasia on Blyton and David Bowie, they may never be able to do so again. Royle writes confidently that ‘the most obvious route to thinking about sex in the Famous Five books is Timmy the dog’. Once this bombshell has been absorbed, he knocks the reader down again by writing: ‘Timmy is a big dog. He is a big-tongued dog. He must have had a huge donger too.’ The idea behind David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun

You may (or may not) already know this, but researching the long 18th century in 2023 is rarely a life-affirming, paradigm-shifting conversation over wine with Plato in the groves of academe. It is seldom, even, a couple of tins of warm lager on the train home after guesting on an episode of Start the Week. It is sometimes, though, sitting in an archive transcribing the traces of long-vanished lives, conscious of the passing of time, quietly excited but still wondering if any of this actually matters, whether the partial recovery of someone else’s life really is the fullest way of living your own. Reading Ian Marchant’s deeply moving new book