Why does George Orwell still sound so modern?

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language and the strange art of writing sentences that refuse to grow old

There is something peculiar about reading George Orwell. You can pick up an essay written eighty or ninety years ago, settle into the first paragraph and almost immediately forget how old it is. The clothes have changed. The politics have certainly changed, and the references sometimes need explaining.

But the voice seems to arrive without having travelled through time at all. Orwell sounds as though he's sitting across the table from us, slightly impatient, about to explain something that ought to have been obvious in the first place. It's one of the main reasons why I find myself going back to Orwell again and again.

Marttin and the art of having a literary opinion

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers and the lost pleasure of writers telling us exactly what they think

I've just reread The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, and somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, being irritated by it and occasionally wondering how on earth a 23-year-old got away with some of it, I found myself thinking about criticism. Not criticism of Amis, but Amis as critic.

That might seem an odd response to The Rachel Papers, a novel published in 1973 about Charles Highway, an extraordinarily self-absorbed, arrogant character pursuing a place at Oxford and Rachel Noyes with the sort of strategic planning normally associated with a minor military campaign. 

Joan Didion — What if the person the writer is selling out is herself?

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and what happens when the writer turns the camera on herself

We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Can you write about someone you cannot understand?

Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary and what happens when a writer cannot find the explanation

Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another. 

In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't? 

What if you trusted a writer with your story?

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer and the betrayal at the heart of nonfiction

Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.

Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.

That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.

Can you tell the truth by making things up?

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the strange truth of Gonzo journalism

Here's a question. Can you tell the truth by making things up? Norman Mailer walked into the story and announced himself. Joan Didion sat quietly at the edge of it and watched.

Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.

Whatever happened to Donna Tartt? Thirteen years later, we're still waiting

A while ago, I wrote a post asking a fairly simple question: whatever happened to Donna Tartt?

It started because I'd found my signed copy of The Goldfinch in a box in the attic. From there, I fell down the Donna Tartt rabbit hole and started wondering why one of my favourite writers hadn't published a novel in more than a decade.

Well, here we are again. On 23 September 2026, it will be thirteen years since The Goldfinch was first published. Thirteen years without a new Donna Tartt novel and, this time, we've officially entered uncharted territory.

Joan Didion and Norman Mailer: The literary odd couple

Joan Didion and Norman Mailer do not immediately strike you as two writers who should have had much in common.

Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.

Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.

Can a writer ever get out of the way?

Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song and what happened after In Cold Blood

Truman Capote had a problem. He was too good a writer.

In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith. 

Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.

So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?

Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.

Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the dangerous business of becoming somebody’s material

In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion leaves us with a warning.

'Writers are always selling somebody out.'

It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.

The comeback of the literary antihero

There was a time when readers expected to admire the protagonist. We wanted courage, kindness and, if not perfection, then at least someone worth cheering on. Heroes made mistakes, but they usually found redemption. Justice, more often than not, prevailed.

Modern literary fiction has taken a rather different path.

Today, some of the most memorable novels are populated by characters who are selfish, manipulative, emotionally detached or quietly destructive. They lie. They disappoint us. Sometimes they commit terrible acts. More often than not, they simply refuse to become the people we hope they will be.

Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?

Every January, the same ritual begins.

We all do it. Me included.

As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.

I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.

Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.

On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.

But is it really?

The best books about the Falklands War: Three essential reads and the remarkable story behind Operation Corporate

England's recent World Cup meeting with Argentina has, perhaps inevitably, prompted renewed discussion about the Falklands War. Sporting rivalries rarely exist in isolation, and while football should never be conflated with conflict, moments like these often encourage people to revisit the history that continues to shape relations between the two nations.

More than forty years after the war, the Falklands campaign remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the twentieth century. Lasting just seventy-four days between April and June 1982, it saw Britain project military power halfway around the world to retake a remote British Overseas Territory after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982.

Why do brilliant novels so often fail at the finish?

A disappointing ending to a novel you've been enjoying has a peculiar power over us. At least it does for me. 

You can spend days immersed in a novel, recommend it to friends before you've even finished it, and carry the characters around in your head. Then you reach the final chapter and something doesn't quite land. The ending feels rushed, overly clever, relentlessly bleak, or simply at odds with everything that came before.

It raises an uncomfortable question. Can a bad ending ruin a great novel? I'm asking as I have read a slew of novels recently where this has been the experience.

At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.

Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

Why Dune is still the greatest science fiction novel ever written

There are books you admire. There are books you enjoy. Then there are the handful that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Frank Herbert's Dune belongs firmly in that last category for me. I've lost count of how many times I've read it, and every return journey to Arrakis reveals something I missed before. It isn't simply one of my favourite science fiction novels. It is one of my favourite novels, full stop. There, I said it.

Beautiful sentences, difficult people: Can we separate a writer’s style from their reputation?

There are writers we admire without reservation. Then there are the others.

The writers whose sentences remain brilliant while their reputations grow increasingly uncomfortable. The writers whose private behaviour, political beliefs or public remarks alter the atmosphere around their books.

A novel or essay once encountered innocently can become harder to read after we learn more about the person who wrote it. The words have not changed, but the reader has.