Books of the Year 2023
Our contributors select their favourites
A detail of “Skaters near the Shore of Kalela” by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1896|© Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
November 17, 2023
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DAVID ABULAFIA
In Against Decolonisation: Campus culture wars and the decline of the West (Polity), Doug Stokes lays bare clearly and concisely the arguments surrounding legacies of the past that are nowadays deployed in universities and elsewhere. He moves with great agility beyond the “decolonization” of curricula, libraries and museum collections to consider the nature and implications of critical theory. This incisive, humane and brave book does not cajole its readers, but sets out its case in a measured way.
Turning to the Mediterranean, I was charmed by Islam Issa’s Alexandria: The city that changed the world (Sceptre), which recovers elegantly and poignantly the long history of rich interactions among the many communities of the city.
My favourite novel, a delight for lovers of Japan, was Nick Bradley’s ingenious Bildungsroman Four Seasons in Japan (Doubleday), even though it shares with Haruki Murakami an obsession with cats.
TERRI APTER
Four decades ago Carol Gilligan’s seminal book In a Different Voice identified an ethics of care in the voices of girls and women as they considered moral dilemmas – distinct from the focus on individual rights found in boys. Her recent book In a Human Voice (Polity) delves beneath gender to ask: “What does it mean to speak in a human voice?” Responsiveness and care, Gilligan argues, are central to humans. Wherever these are lacking, regardless of gender, we need to ask what has gone wrong. The author’s exposé of the harms inflicted by personal trauma and common cultural ideals is essential reading for our time.
The flow of complex music from a conductor’s baton is often presented as a mystical process performed by a “maestro”. In Good Hands: The making of a modern conductor by Alice Farnham (Faber) explores the process of conducting, demystifying the work while leaving the magic intact.
MARY BEARD
I am continuing my tradition of focusing on one Cinderella of publishing: exhibition catalogues, often forgotten once the show they accompany has closed. This year a stand-out catalogue is Aoife Brady’s Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, rule breaker, produced for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland on the sixteenth-century woman artist from Bologna. As the foreword acknowledges, for most of us Fontana “is not yet a name to conjure with”. But unlike other, rather desperate attempts to rediscover forgotten geniuses, this one makes you realize you have missed something: from her clever portraits to wonderful canvases recapturing classical and biblical scenes (a particular star is the vast “The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”). And for those who like systematic catalogues, rather than vaguer “books of the exhibition”, this is it. There is a full entry for each of the paintings on show: a real work of reference.
LUCY BECKETT
Bernard Wasserstein, distinguished historian, and Daniel Finkelstein, Tory peer, were born in London. Their Jewish parents were extraordinarily lucky to have survived, through resourcefulness and pure chance, the Holocaust and Stalin’s tyranny. Wasserstein’s father came from a shtetl in Polish Galicia and his mother was the only survivor of her Hungarian-Jewish family. The Finkelsteins were prosperous figures in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine). Daniel’s maternal grandfather, born in Potsdam, was Alfred Wiener of the Wiener Holocaust Library; Belsen killed his wife and almost killed his daughters. Except for the Berlin Wieners, the other grandparents had roots in different parts of Franz Joseph’s tolerant Habsburg empire, shattered by the First World War. Wasserstein’s A Small Town in Ukraine (Allen Lane) and Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins) are thoroughly researched and enthralling stories of family suffering through, and triumph over, the worst horrors of the twentieth century: two remarkable books.
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC
Lifescapes, the biographer Ann Wroe’s ninth book (Cape), seamlessly merges scenes from the author’s life with the overflow from her admirably humane Economist obituaries, whose subjects, she writes, “whether famous or unknown … have enhanced the world by their existence”. This glimpse of Wroe at work, enriched with stories from her private notebooks, is a treat akin to, borrowing her words, “wild plums fallen in the grass”.
Marilyn Hacker’s collection Calligraphies (Norton) catches the poet’s life – in Paris, in Beirut – on the fly. Set in a French village “gone silent in pandemic mode”, the first of the five sonnet crowns that frame Calligraphies eavesdrops on the poet’s thoughts and weaves into them the concrete details (“new cafés, roof tiles”) that characteristically ground Hacker’s poems. Their spaciousness within the bounds of traditional forms of many provenances has fascinated me since I first happened on them in a Paris bookshop.
PAUL BINDING
Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz (Faber) won’t leave me alone. Reading it I felt possessed by its power, its voice of humane authority, its relentless narrative drive, its unfolding and refolding of complex ethical themes, its rich flexibility of style and positively audible verisimilitude of dialogue between galvanic (and physically well-realized) personnel. This last is the more remarkable because we are confronting Americans of 1922, many with Anopa, a Native American lingua franca, as first language. While the novel presents a counterfactual history of the United States, with Amerindians a sizeable constituent and a Mid-western city – the eponymous Cahokia – where they predominate, it was Spufford himself, of course, who imagined this history. That explains why its conflicts – violent, charged by hatred – resonate psychically as well as culturally, and why the two men at its centre can appeal to our hearts. With this third novel Spufford joins the front rank of living novelists.
WILLIAM BOYD
We now know that Max Brod’s bowdlerized mid-twentieth-century edition of Franz Kafka’s diaries of 1909–23 was, if not a crass violation, then a poor simulacrum of the real thing. The real thing became available, in German, in 1990. Now it comes to us in English courtesy of Ross Benjamin’s new translation – Franz Kafka: The diaries (Schocken). Here we can gain access to one of the most bizarrely complex and tormented literary minds, ever. It is fascinating. And so brilliantly translated, you would think Kafka was writing in impeccable English. I recommend reading these random, anguished, ruthlessly self-analytical pages in tandem with Nicholas Murray’s formidably cogent and clear-eyed biography, Kafka (2004), to give valuable context to these extraordinary, candid revelations.
DAVID BROMWICH
Someone said about James Cagney that he was hard as nails, but never mean as dirt. Paul Newman’s appeal was similar. His coolness sprang from a source that seemed deeper than charm and unrelated to self-love. Melissa Newman’s Head Over Heels (Little, Brown) and the film star’s own The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man (2022), make a natural pair: one a book of brilliant photographs with captions of Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward, the other a memoir with recollections by friends. What emerges is a transcript of revelation and reserve as fascinating as Laurence Olivier’s autobiography; except that Olivier was an actor who became a star, Newman a star who became an actor. Men and women admired him for a quality they would have agreed to call masculine, but they probably meant quite different things. John Huston is quoted saying that Newman and Jack Nicholson (his only successor for sheer mystique) lived on the same street, but at different addresses.
CLARE CARLISLE
I’m beginning to think humour is the most appropriate medium for philosophy. Laughter has a nose for truth. As a chronically unfunny writer that’s bad news, but as a reader it’s a treat to be provoked into serious thought and entertained. I kept laughing out loud as I read Elif Batuman’s Either/Or last Christmas. It is the sequel to the equally hilarious and thoughtful The Idiot, so make sure you read that first. Named after Kierkegaard’s debut attempt at philosophical comedy, Either/Or is set at Harvard, where the angsty Selin is studying Russian literature, 1990s parties and her problems.
Christine Smallwood’s brilliant novel The Life of the Mind (2021) is similarly super-smart, in a darker comic vein. This moving tale of the sorrows and joys of “early career” academia, aka adjunct hell, takes its title from a (much less fun) book by Hannah Arendt.
ALEX CLARK
I loved Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap (Chatto and Windus), in which the art critic shares her long-nurtured love of Dutch Golden Age painting, defending it fiercely from the idea that it was somehow merely muddy, materialistic and mundane. She writes with such delicacy about the power of looking deeply, the painter Carel Fabritius and her late father, the abstract painter James Cumming. Like her book about her mother’s life, On Chapel Sands (2019), Thunderclap demonstrates Cumming’s profundity as a writer of personal memoir, as well as her ability to animate works of art and their creators.
In fiction, I also fell for an art-based tale – Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X (Granta), a brilliantly playful examination of reputation and posterity that somehow also encompasses an alternative history of a politically divided America.
JONATHAN CLARK
If TLS readers were asked to draft a job description for the perfect guide to the ideology of identity politics, how would it run? Perhaps like this: a scholar of English, taking degrees at several universities, culminating in an Oxford DPhil on Renaissance English literature; professionally versed in recent literary and philosophical schools; an outspoken campaigner for civil rights in the idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, celebrating a range of subsequent victories on those battlefields; a gay man with much insight into more recent debates on gender; writing with passionate commitment. Too much to ask? But here he is: Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans: How the religion of social justice captured the western world (Constable) unpacks the contest for writers and readers of literature, philosophers, historians and activists. In the arts everything changes; this is the best map of where, for better or worse, we have arrived.
PAUL COLLIER
As the world collapses, Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Allen Lane) is an insightful and readable guide. The degree to which orthodox economics is complicit in this unequal, greed-ridden house of cards is honestly faced by Angus Deaton, one of the profession’s giants, in Economics in America (Princeton). A powerful mea culpa, it is also a milestone in restoring the profession to the family of human sciences.
My find of the year, Revoir Igloolik by Serge Michailof (Nuvis), blends development economics and mémoire. The economics is a powerful and timely critique of the decades of failed projects behind the current meltdowns in the Sahel and Central Asia. Michailof, a polymath, is a rare scholar-whistleblower close to the decisions responsible. His life story combines the tragedy of Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet (2010) with the adventures of Crocodile Dundee. Unsurprisingly, it sold out in France. Pray orders are ready for Christmas, or wait for a translation.
PATRICIA CRAIG
Here it is – an epistolary cornucopia. The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber; edited by Christopher Reid) contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent. The theme of friendship is paramount here, along with many fascinating aspects of social, intellectual and public life. If low moods are not absent, due to overwork or a daunting itinerary, neither are occasional jeux d’esprit in the form of impromptu verse letters. The book covers a period of nearly fifty years, with Heaney’s utterly civilized apprehension of the world in evidence from the start.
Among Heaney’s great gifts was a flair for translation, and two of his translations from the Irish of the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh appear in the latter’s evocative dual-language tribute to “a spectacular presence” in his native countryside. Errigal: Sacred mountain (Irish Pages) is a rich mixture of reminiscence and reflection, deeply attuned to the bounty and the mystery of the Donegal landscape.
DIANA DARKE
For those seeking deeper context and clarity on the Israel-Palestine crisis, two excellent books appeared earlier this year. Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914–1939 by Peter Shambrook (Oneworld) is the work of a lifetime, a forensic, fair-minded examination of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence that exposes how the British government broke its promises to the people of Palestine and concealed this betrayal from the British public. Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld) takes place across Iraq, Israel and the UK. It describes the forgotten world of Arab Jews in a page-turning account of how the author’s Jewish family fled to Israel from Baghdad to escape the rising antisemitism caused by the establishment of the fledgling state in 1948, only to find themselves treated with contempt by the Zionist elite, who saw them as second-class citizens compared to European Jews.
RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
The most exciting book that I have read this century is Journeys of the Mind (Princeton), an intellectual memoir by the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. Immaculately written, radiant with wisdom, generous, grateful and gladdening, it matches The Education of Henry Adams without the haughty wounded misanthropy.
Brown drew formative ideas from the anthropologist who is the subject of A Touch of Genius: The life, work and influence of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (Sean Kingston). Edited by André Singer, this multi-author tribute celebrates the vitality and compelling charm of a thinker whose originality and theoretical sophistication inspired younger scholars on many continents. It is a work of loving scholarship, endearing in places and intellectually animating.
M. W. Rowe’s J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day intelligence officer (OUP) is a revelatory work of intelligence history, ingeniously built from scattered and skimpy materials. It is a keen study of a flinty, unflinching personality, too, and an enriching philosophical explication.
MARGARET DRABBLE
I first came across the work of Patrick McGuinness in an Observer review that quoted in full “Sure Things” from his latest collection, Blood Feather (Cape). This short poem seemed to have been written specially for me, but when I read the rest of the volume I found many other personal resonances – the cooling towers of Didcot, the bony metal footbridge over the motorway to Littlemore, The Plain and many other Oxfordshire prospects; Travelodges, telephone landlines; snatches of Horace and Virgil; and a haunting epigraph from Poussin – “I who make profession of mute things”. The poems about McGuinness’s dying mother and the towns and landscapes of her Belgian heritage are very moving. I went on to read his 2011 novel The Last Hundred Days, which is good. But the poems are the thing. The sure things.
IRINA DUMITRESCU
Dorothy Tse didn’t invent the bumbling, over-the-hill academic headed for disaster, but hers is one of the most memorable. Professor Q – the love child of Don Quixote and Professor Unrat – spends his days as a hollow mannequin, “finding new ways to perform other people’s voices” in his dull scholarship. His escape is an affair with a life-size ballerina doll named Aliss, who comes to life under his awkward sexual ministrations. Their Wonderland: Nevers, a shadow version of Hong Kong, increasingly haunted by the totalitarian rule of neighbouring Ksana and roiled by doomed student protests. In short, glimmering chapters, Owlish (Fitzcarraldo Editions; nimbly translated by Natascha Bruce) reveals how the loss of freedom divides people from one another and from themselves. Tse’s novel is playful, poetic and devastating – a reminder that surrealist writing is not unreal, but the most real way of depicting the nightmare of living under tyranny.
BERNARDINE EVARISTO
I relished every word of the novel Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks (Cape). Set in London and Bristol in the 1970s and early 1980s, it traces a young Black woman’s journey into the seductive dub reggae scene of the time, where dangers lurk and her life begins to spin out of control. This is a wonderfully literary, musical and original novel about a culture and era that rarely makes the pages of fiction. Crooks was sixty years old when it was published earlier this year, and she writes with the depth and maturity of having already lived a long life. It was rightly shortlisted for the Women’s and Waterstones Debut Fiction prizes.
FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO
I’m grateful to the TLS for making me read Adam Kuper’s The Museum of Other People (Profile). I love its irreverence, candour and sense of the ridiculous – none of which occludes the author’s scholarship, wisdom and common sense.
MARK FORD
The Books and Life of Raymond Roussel by Michael Sanchez (Galerie Buchholz) is a treasure trove of delights for anyone interested in this astonishing writer. A sumptuous catalogue raisonné of all things Rousselian, it includes previously unpublished photographs of his family, his ill-fated theatrical ventures and his travels around the world, along with facsimiles of the covers of his lavishly produced books. Particularly fascinating are reproductions of the dedications inscribed in copies to those such as André Gide and Jean Cocteau (both great admirers), and to the psychologist Pierre Janet, who treated Roussel and wrote up his case in De l’angoisse à l’extase (1926). In his consultations Roussel would declare that he was destined to rival in fame Dante, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Napoleon. While even Sanchez would concede that such a prediction is unlikely to come true, his research is testimony to the fascination that Roussel exerts over the initiated, and a welcome addition to the library of anyone who believes the author deserves a little more of the fame he so ardently craved.
ROY FOSTER
Alvin Jackson’s original slant on the history of Irish and Scottish unions is decisively expanded in United Kingdoms: Multinational union states in Europe and beyond, 1800–1925 (OUP) – illuminating the once British Isles by means of Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, above all, the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy (whose “ramshackle” nature was nostalgically admired by James Joyce). Jackson’s taxonomy of modern union states raises influences, parallels and cross-fertilizations, exhumes forgotten theorists and analyses monarchy and federalism: comparative history at its best.
Peter McDonald’s indispensable edition of The Poems of W. B. Yeats, Volume Three: 1899–1910 (Routledge) masterfully documents textual variation and embeds the works in their intellectual and biographical background as Yeats projects new directions in verse and drama, and sounds the harsher note that emerged in Responsibilities (1914).
Harshness irradiates Martina Evans’s riveting narrative poem The Coming Thing (Carcanet): the demotic style of 1980s Cork punk undercuts the determination of the heroine, Imelda, to substitute experience for innocence, and damn the cost. There are echoes of Shane MacGowan and early Edna O’Brien, but no one else is writing like this.
DAMON GALGUT
My book of the year, hands down, is Jonny Steinberg’s monumental Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a marriage (William Collins). Far more than just an eye-opening, head-shaking account of the lives of the Mandelas, both together and apart, it’s also a devastating study of modern South Africa. I also savoured Michael Mewshaw’s funny, gossipy, thoughtful account of his fractious friendship with Graham Greene, My Man in Antibes (Godine).
PAUL GRIFFITHS
Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo (Faber) is the outstanding music book of this and several years. Eichler’s subtitle discloses his subject: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the music of remembrance. His absorbing examination of a small number of compositions addressing the war, including Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and Britten’s War Requiem, makes a strong case for music as that dark period’s memory bank for a time, soon coming, when there will be no witness left. Eichler has a professional music critic’s ability to bring music to life without using technical language, and his presence in his narrative as he visits sites and asks questions, of himself or others, is exemplary in its discretion and wisdom.
RACHEL HADAS
Ben Berman’s Writing While Parenting (Able Muse Press), vignettes on life and art, juxtaposes freshness and humour with frustration and puzzlement, exhaustion and sadness. Glimpses of his life as father and husband, poet and teacher and Jew, take us on car trips and into classrooms and playgrounds. Peering into a grubby refrigerator we may hear the voices of Eliot or Rumi, Jonathan Safran Foer or Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. Modest in tone as in scale, Berman’s anecdotes avoid sentimentality or pat morals; they offer charm as well as insight in palatable doses.
Carl Phillips’s My Trade Is Mystery: Seven meditations from a life in writing (Yale) takes a different route to arrive at not dissimilar wisdom. Phillips’s poetry has a coiled elegance of syntax; his distinctive prose shares some of this tension as he grapples with the aesthetic and ethical challenges of his trade. Phillips pushes back against contemporary truisms about community, career and much else. One essay, “Stamina”, illuminates “the necessary and ongoing calibration of arrogance and humility that helps the artist distinguish ambition for the work from the endlessly hungry, other ambition for public approval”.
Both these quietly courageous books are islands of sanity and grace in the roaring tempest of rage and cant that constitutes much of public discourse.
JAMES HALL
Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856) is one of the great illustrated books, never out of print. It has 100 “carpet page” plates sumptuously printed in chromolithography, with more than 2,000 design motifs culled from a global array of sources, arranged by country. Twenty essays describe each of the styles represented, and thirty-seven “Propositions” convey his belief that historical examples should be a springboard for new designs suited to the modern age, rather than slavishly aped, as Pugin and Ruskin believed. In Owen Jones and the V&A: Ornament for a modern age (Lund Humphries), Olivia Horsfall Turner deftly places Jones in the vanguard of the design revolution, charting his key role in the decoration of the Great Exhibition and the V&A’s “Oriental Court”, and highlighting his equally innovative Examples of Chinese Ornament (1867). Horsfall Turner is level-headed about Jones’s “Orientalism”, but concludes that he decisively put non-western design sources centre stage.
CLAIRE HARMAN
Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s double life (Allen Lane) is a study of the novelist through her intellectual and moral preoccupations that carves out a space somewhere between biography and literary criticism in a most satisfying way. Carlisle is a philosopher and reads Eliot like an expert witness, recreating her dynamic, ambitious reading and lifelong commitment to intellectual growth and showing its impact in and out of the novels. It finds another layer of Eliot to contemplate and admire, and is thoroughly absorbing.
Patrick McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice in whatever medium he chooses, so this year’s return to poetry with Blood Feather (Cape) was welcome. His buoyant imagination always carries the day, however melancholic his themes (as the ones here certainly are), but he can also be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as “Tired Metaphor” is enough for any writer in any year.
SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH
Set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the decades before the 1791 revolution, A Secret Among the Blacks by John D. Garrigus (Harvard) offers a fresh perspective on the resistance of the enslaved. Using new archival material and maps of the northern region, the author argues that the deaths blamed on the runaway leader Makandal (executed in 1758 for attempting to poison the colony’s white settlers) were due to anthrax, and that Makandal was in fact a diviner.
At the same time Garrigus shows how Makandal’s African healing and spiritual practices developed revolutionary tendencies among Saint-Domingue’s captives, forging social and cultural connections that encouraged dissent and fostered alternative political visions to enslavement. Focusing on individual figures such as the African-born Médor, he makes a plausible case for his revisionist version of the Makandal story and sheds a revealing light on the wider origins of the Haitian revolution.
In the bicentenary year of the Demerara slave revolt, I would also like to mention Thomas Harding’s White Debt (2022), a powerful, engaging account of this uprising, the second of the three major colonial insurrections (starting with Barbados, and ending in Jamaica) that led to the abolition of slavery in Britain.
LISA HILTON
Robin Lane Fox’s Homer and His Iliad (Allen Lane) offers Homer in parallax: this sweeping and sweetly personal study examines the ur-poem of Hellenic culture from myriad angles, taking in the precise geographical perspectives of its key scenes and the number of goatskins required to copy it out. Whether or not one agrees with Lane Fox’s argument that “Homer” was a real individual, the book is a comprehensive delight for amateurs and academics alike, as the author soars through the canon of Homeric scholarship with a magisterial deftness worthy of any Olympian. A captivating tribute to a lifelong love of the original epic.
MICHAEL HOFMANN
It’s a shade less than ten years since Faber New Poets 12, so it’s unfair to call Declan Ryan exactly new; an atrial or pericardial poet, then. The time has been put to use. In his first trade book, Crisis Actor (Faber), the boxing pieces are elegies for noble artists, and the poems on poets and other doomed singers fight reports on sluggers gone under. Who knew that writing with this degree of care and pain and tact was still possible? For my money it’s the best first volume in decades, I would say since Tom Paulin’s A State of Justice (1977): no dead weight, foot-perfect and engaging.
TOM HOLLAND
I hugely enjoyed Mark Gregory Pegg’s history of the Middle Ages, Beatrice’s Last Smile (OUP). It is a wonderful tapestry of a book, woven from myriad biographies and incidents ranging from the reign of Septimius Severus to the Hundred Years War: learned, compassionate and beautiful written. The obvious comparison is with Peter Brown – but a Peter Brown whose narrative extends to the fifteenth century. Methodologically innovative, often thrillingly revisionist, yet never less than a model of humane scholarship, it is the best single-volume history of the Middle Ages that I have read in a long while.
ROBERT IRWIN
In Journeys of the Mind: A life in history (Princeton) Peter Brown, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton, chronicles the evolution over seventy years of his thinking about the culture of late antiquity and his struggles to get that period accepted by academics as a significant field of historical study. His prolific writings on this subject began with his highly original and beautifully written Augustine of Hippo: A biography (1967). In Brown’s intellectual autobiography he records how his thinking was shaped by his engagement with continental scholarship, as well as by books that at first sight might seem to have nothing to do with late antiquity, including Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique and Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. Equally striking is the growth of his interest in the Arab and Iranian lands as heirs of late antiquity. At 714 pages this is a great book in both senses of the word.
NELLY KAPRIÈLIAN-SELF
Triste tigre by Neige Sinno (P. O. L.) has been the shock of the rentrée littéraire in France, winning the Prix Femina. From the first chapter, “Portrait de mon violeur” (“Portrait of my rapist”), to the last, “Le pays des ténèbres” (“The country of darkness”), I’ve been overwhelmed by both sideration and admiration in the face of such intelligence. Sinno writes about the rapes perpetrated on her by her stepfather, from the age of seven to fourteen. But Triste tigre isn’t just a memoir or a testimony. It is also an essay in which she examines all aspects of rape: the impossibility of speaking, the manipulation, the sex itself, how this horror has shaped her personality. The whole book is a brilliant interrogation of the nature of evil, and how it can happen so easily, under everybody’s nose.
DANIEL KARLIN
Lore Segal’s Ladies’ Lunch (Sort Of) casts an unsparing eye on the diet of bitter herbs enjoyed by the very old. The stories are tragicomic, without the second term palliating the first. The ladies in the title mostly inhabit apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but they spring from the same encompassing view of human nature that Jane Austen brought to Meryton or Highbury. The thick seams of thoughtlessness that run through families, and the rare metals of kindness or generosity, are mined, sifted and brought to light. Segal’s special province is friendship, and some of the saddest of these stories tell of the ways in which even the strongest can buckle. Time is unremitting, but this wonderful writer is still undefeated.
JOHN KERRIGAN
Who has done the most for Liverpool – the Beatles, Ken Dodd, Wayne Rooney? In scholarship the answer has to be Tony Crowley, who has published a magisterial, repeatedly surprising history of Scouse (both the stew and the vernacular) and a Liverpool English Dictionary. In his absorbing new book, Liverpool: A memoir of words (Liverpool University Press), he marries lexicography to autobiography, using an abecedary of keywords from “Ace” to “Z-Cars” as ways back into his upbringing in the south end of the city. Crowley gives a capacious but exact account of the common language of shared experience, its games, jokes and deprivations. This is a go-to study of the origin of plazzymorphs in Liverpudlian irreverence: diddy (little), aereegogs (aeroplanes), ozzy (hospital) and, come to that, plazzy (plastic). Touching, sceptical and massively well-informed, it’s an ace book, wackers.
OLIVIA LAING
Art, says Jeremy Deller, “is a way of staying engaged and in love with the world”. His exuberant book Art Is Magic (Cheerio) certainly made me feel more hopeful, not least about the capacity of artists to engage politically without being dull or alienating their audiences. It’s a gorgeous survey of Deller’s career in all its eccentric and wayward brilliance. Brass bands playing acid house, a life-size inflatable of Stonehenge, a 1,000-person re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave – and that’s just the first twenty-nine pages. Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren (Cape), meanwhile, felt like a writer taking on the last 100 years of Irish literature, a work of astounding ventriloquism and hard-won hope about women’s lives.
MICHAEL LAPOINTE
Still Pictures: On photography and memory by Janet Malcolm (Granta) is a memoir, almost. Each of its slight chapters (“Mother”, “School Days”, “More on Mother”) is anchored by a photograph from Malcolm’s life that she uses as a prompt for memory. But as a journalist Malcolm, who passed away in 2021, was hyper-aware of the dynamics of self-revelation, so the author is only obliquely visible. Her first memory is of being given peony petals, rather than the typical rose petals, to throw at a village festival. “Are roses better than peonies?”, she asks, opening a sudden glimpse of a child’s feelings of inadequacy and exclusion. But instead she frames the moment as her introduction to a lifelong debate about “absolute aesthetic value”. There remains something sphinx-like in these pictures, and Malcolm recedes as we reach out to grasp her. This is her last book; some people we will never understand.
SAM LEITH
I’ve spent most of this year reading children’s books for a book project of my own, but I don’t think TLS readers will need telling that Watership Down is great, T. H. White and Kipling still greater, and Goodnight Moon a work of genius. Red Memory (Faber), Tania Branigan’s deeply reported book about the Cultural Revolution, and how its barely discussed history is a fingernail scratch below the surface of modern China, told me all sorts of things I didn’t know and am not sure I wanted to.
Carlo Rovelli’s Anaximander: And the nature of science (Allen Lane) was also a knockout: there’s nobody like Rovelli for bridging the Two Cultures, and I was enlarged by his lucid, optimistic account, full of fascinating historical nuggets, of what scientists do and why it’s exciting. And the new Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (Baskerville), is bliss – but that won’t surprise anybody.
LEO LENSING
Daniel Kehlmann’s historical novel Lichtspiel (“Photoplay”; Rowohlt) appeared in bookshops in Vienna while I was there in early October. Having read a few pages on my last day in the city, I was three-quarters of the way through by the time my plane set down in New York. The compromises and betrayals of G. W. Pabst’s years making films for Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry are at the centre of richly imagined encounters on sets and behind the scenes. The book’s compelling narrative and stylistic inventiveness rival those of Measuring the World and Tyll, Kehlmann’s earlier, brilliant exercises in the genre. A comic interlude in the darkly tragic tale is a chapter narrated by Rudolf Wooster, a lightly fictionalized version of P. G. Wodehouse, whose Berlin radio broadcasts throw Pabst’s collaborationist films into stark relief. Expect a translation soon!
KEITH MILLER
A loud hurrah in praise of Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail), an “anti-memoir” that interrogates and defies various modes of literary production – life writing, speculative fiction, sports writing, even nature writing – and grapples with some of the more numinous aspects of the creative process while remaining utterly coherent, infectiously engaging, packed with rueful wisdom and a distinctive sense of mischief.
The novel I enjoyed most was The Secret Hours by Mick Herron (Baskerville), an origin story for certain elements of the Slough House extended universe. Herron’s work isn’t without its infelicities (a tendency to indulge in long and somewhat overwritten throat-clearing mises en scène, a predilection for bullying, knockabout dialogue that’s more EastEnders than Ostpolitik), but it is funny, sharply observed and almost uniquely acute and sensitive in its consideration of something most novelists seem to regard with a lofty uninterest: the world of work.
ANDREW MOTION
In Woman Much Missed (OUP), a companion volume to his study of Thomas Hardy’s fiction (Half a Londoner, 2016), Mark Ford considers the elegies that Hardy wrote for his first wife, Emma. They amount to nearly one-fifth of the 919 poems contained in the eight volumes that Hardy published during his lifetime. The best known appeared in the sequence Poems of 1912–13, and Ford writes about these with a likeable blend of straightforwardness and subtlety. He’s equally shrewd about less well-known pieces, and as he traces the shape of Hardy’s grief – from memories of the “strange necromancy” that drew him to Emma in the first place through to guilty recollections of their unhappy later life together – he creates a sense of narrative momentum that is rare in literary criticism. Ford does Emma justice too, showing her living influence on Hardy’s writing as well as the effect of her posthumous hauntings.
PAUL MULDOON
This is the golden age of Irish prose fiction. Of our many prodigiously talented novelists, few have the all-encompassing deftness of touch of Anne Enright. The Wren, The Wren (Cape) is a multi-generational portrait of the family of Phil McDaragh, an old-school Irish poet who puts the Phil firmly in philandering. McDaragh also dabbles in translation from the Gaelic, and would surely welcome the magisterial “Look Back to Look Forward”: Frank O’Connor’s complete translations from the Irish (Lilliput Press), edited by Gregory A. Schirmer. As to what Frank O’Connor might have admired from 2023, I would suggest Garry Bannister’s already indispensable Teasáras Gaeilge-Béarla/Irish–English Thesaurus (New Island).
JEREMY NOEL-TOD
The new translation of César Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) jointly published by Crater Press and Veer Books is almost a foot square. It clears an immersive reading space for a parallel text with translator glosses by William Rowe and Helen Dimos, who devotedly draw out each poem’s “difficult blast of noise”. We now have such writing in English too: Peter Gizzi’s preface to the new City Lights edition of Clark Coolidge’s epic experiment in meditation, The Crystal Text (1986), is just right on its “microscopic wiggy detail” and “cosmic” scale (“The crystal brings sided air to a water standing”). Paradise Lost was once this weird.
My anthology of the year was Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diasporas (Bloodaxe), edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett, which is everything an anthology should be: conscientious, archival, surprising, world-building, full of voices and lives.
PETER PARKER
The Sassoons by Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson (Yale) was particularly welcome for those of us unable to visit the exhibition of the same name at the Jewish Museum in New York. It tells the extraordinary story of how, after being expelled from his native Iraq in 1830, David Sassoon became a hugely successful merchant in Bombay, with businesses across Asia and in London. The immense wealth that he accumulated allowed his descendants to become generous philanthropists and notable collectors and patrons of the arts. While some amassed Judaica and Chinese objects, the English branch of the family bought important European paintings and commissioned works from John Singer Sargent, Rex Whistler and Glyn Philpot. This lavishly produced and beautifully illustrated book concludes with an excellent chapter on the “scattered legacy” of the Sassoons’ architectural patronage: the hospitals, houses, colleges and synagogues that they built across the world, from Mumbai to Dinard and from Shanghai to Barnet.
MARJORIE PERLOFF
In Proust, roman familial (Robert Laffont), Laure Murat has produced a critical study as personal (though never confessional) as it is scholarly and analytic about her relationship to Marcel Proust, whose À la recherche du temps perdu was to transform her life. Born into a reactionary aristocratic family – her father was a descendant of the Napoleonic Prince Murat, her mother the eldest daughter of the Duc de Luynes, descended from the favourite of Louis XIII – she left her elegant home for ever when, at eighteen, the news that she was in love with another woman caused her mother to declare she never wanted to see her again. Minds were never to change, but Murat has succeeded very well on her own as writer, scholar and cultural critic. She first read Proust when she was twenty, but it has taken her decades to understand how his dissection of the “empty forms” or codes of aristocratic life sheds light on her own identity and vice versa. In the course of her analysis, as subtle and witty as it is moving, she shows not only what she learnt from her fellow “exile”, but also what it is about Proust’s writing that makes, for so many of us, the Recherche the great novel of the twentieth century.
SEAMUS PERRY
Christopher Reid’s edition of The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber) is, apparently, just a sampling of an enormous correspondence, but it communicates marvellously the encompassing personality and intelligence of this fine poet. Heaney’s genius for friendship is striking – but no less his willingness to assume the diverse, often burdensome duties of a very public figure. Perhaps most impressive, and moving, is the tenacity with which he resisted the expectation to be a merely representative voice: “I just don’t want to be parading out / With the team”, he wrote to James Simmons, “I want a solo run”.
A more melancholy enjoyment was Saskia Hamilton’s posthumous volume of poems, All Souls (Corsair). These fine, sustained sequences are vividly full of writerly and painterly pleasures, interwoven with glimpses of a local habitation of school buses and jam-making: their sense of suspended motion is like the holding of a breath.
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
I have yet to finish Jonathan I. Israel’s million-plus-word maximum opus Spinoza: Life and legacy (OUP), but do not doubt the definitive quality of its study of Bertrand Russell’s “most noble” of western philosophers. Byron’s friend Samuel Rogers said that when he heard of a good new book, he hurried out to buy an old one. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) has renewed urgency in a world of single-issue flatness. Vero Roberti’s Moscow Under the Skin (1969), last taken out of the London Library in 1986, is a journalist’s account of mundane life in sullen, deceit-full 1960s Moscow, which he loves for all that, and long excursions in the USSR that no end of western intellectuals took for a promising land. Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap (Chatto and Windus) is an elegantly terse – several monosyllables new to me – monograph about the work and abruptly shortened life of Vermeer’s contemporary Carel Fabritius.
ANDREW ROBERTS
John Guy and Julia Fox’s Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the marriage that shook Europe (Bloomsbury) had me riveted. What an extraordinary woman Anne was, and how loathsome of Henry to frame and murder her. An exciting new source for the Asquith ministry is A Liberal Chronicle in Peace and War (OUP), the 1911–15 diaries of the Cabinet minister J. A. Pease, superbly edited by Cameron Hazlehurst and Christine Woodland in an immensely scholarly book. Pease himself didn’t amount to much, but he had an observant eye and a trenchant style. (It’s expensive, but get your library to buy it.)
Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring (Allen Lane) is about the 1848 revolutions, and bowls the reader along effortlessly as country after country in Europe fought bravely to try to get the kind of constitution that Britain had already had for 160 years.
IAN SANSOM
Like anything else, books can be used as missiles, shields and objects of punishment. They can also function as comforters, shelters, as signals, signposts and – of course – as friends. Three books, all published this year, whose various purposes you can decide. Nina Allan’s novel Conquest (Riverrun) is a murder-mystery, an essay on the work of the film-maker Shane Carruth and a work of speculative fiction within a work of speculative fiction, all in one, and bamboozlingly brilliant. Niall Kishtainy’s The Infinite City: Utopian dreams on the streets of London (William Collins) is a timely account of the many thinkers, dreamers, theorists and activists who have imagined London as a utopia. And Sara Wheeler’s Glowing Still: A woman’s life on the road (Abacus) is a wry summing-up of the author’s long life as a travel writer, successfully escaping from her background, her circumstances and herself. We may be lost; we’re not necessarily doomed.
ANNA KATHARINA SCHAFFNER
Ferdinand von Schirach’s career as a writer began relatively late, after many years as a highly respected criminal defence lawyer. Widely celebrated in the German-speaking world, he has received a more muted reception in the UK. His short-story collection Coffee and Cigarettes, published in German in 2019, has recently been beautifully translated into English by Katharina Hall (Baskerville), and is the perfect way into his oeuvre. A selection of short, seemingly autobiographical vignettes, the volume thrives on the tension between von Schirach’s deceptively simple prose and his profoundly humane view of the ethical calamities of our age. His subject matter ranges from loneliness, dark childhoods and the power of art to tragic criminal cases and his own Nazi ancestors. Combining moving character studies with essayistic contemplations of the nature of justice, human dignity and our collective human frailty, von Schirach reflects both on our capacity for cruelty and on our ability to experience healing moments of connection.
ANDREW SCULL
Simon Kuper’s Chums (Profile) provides a devastating portrait of the arrogant rogues and chancers who have spent the past thirteen years playing at politics instead of governing. Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Gove, Cummings, May and the odious Johnson have collectively driven Britain into the ditch. Kuper shows how a life of privilege and entitlement brought them to an Oxford that failed to educate them and, through its debating society, honed their rhetorical skills and intellectual shallowness. There they cultivated the networks and alliances (and rivalries) that enabled their collective climb up the slippery pole. And there they learnt to treat politics as a game, idleness and ignorance as virtues, hard work as the mark of a swot. Their charmed existence gave them an appetite for power unmoored to any substantive goals or ideals and, almost by accident, led them to blunder insouciantly into the great collective act of self-harm that is Brexit.
RUTH SCURR
Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (Allen Lane) is a synthesis of his life’s work: an idiosyncratic guide to the causes of the French Revolution that situates gossip, newssheets, scandal and the word on the streets of Paris at the centre of the story. Erudite and entertaining, Darnton excels in finding the quirky details that bring the past back to life.
The playwright and polymath Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais makes memorable appearances in Darnton’s book, then reappears as a character in Adam Thirlwell’s subversive historical novel The Future Future (Cape). Thirlwell evokes the febrile rumour mill that circled around the Tree of Cracow, in the Palais Royal gardens, before spinning it out of control, out of time and into outer space. Like Darnton, Thirlwell has a terrific ear for dialogue. The coincidence of their books this year made me wish they would write a play together.
NAT SEGNIT
Mike McCormack’s follow-up to his award-winning novel Solar Bones (2016) has brushed off its rivals for 2023’s most obscurely gripping metaphysical thriller like so much dirt on its shoe. The mood of This Plague of Souls (Canongate) is established instantaneously: suffused in a sense of indeterminate dread, yet richly committed to the tangible realities of its setting, an abandoned farmhouse in County Mayo. Nealon has just returned there after a spell in prison. The whereabouts of his wife and young son are unknown. His only contact is with an unnamed man who persists in making obscure threats over the phone. Later he drives to the city to meet his adversary as an unspecified international crisis mirrors his own looming cataclysm. Nealon probing his body for a transmitter is among the most electrifying passages I have read in ages; the novel is an enigmatic, unsettling, Pinteresque masterpiece of withheld information.
ELAINE SHOWALTER
Martin Amis called his last book, Inside Story (2020), a “novelized autobiography”, but it’s also a defiant and witty testimony to mortality and a tender remembrance of his friends and literary heroes. Philip Larkin, poet, died of oesophageal cancer in 1985, aged sixty-three; Saul Bellow, novelist, died in 2005 of stroke, aged eighty-nine; Christopher Hitchens, essayist, died of oesophageal cancer in 2011, aged sixty-two. Although Amis would die of the same disease in May 2023, at the age of seventy-three, did he know when he was writing what was ahead? He bids a tender farewell to his reader: “Goodbye, my reader, I said. Goodbye, my dear, my close, my gentle”. Amis wanted Inside Story to be read “in fitful bursts, … with plenty of doubling back”, and that’s how I’ve been reading and re-reading it this year.
A. E. STALLINGS
Late Romance (St Martin’s Press), David Yezzi’s meticulously researched biography of the poet Anthony Hecht, brings back to the fore (along with a Collected Poems edited by Philip Hoy) one of the most important voices of twentieth-century American letters. Traumatized by what he had witnessed during the Second World War (his division liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp), Hecht wrote some of the most searing poems of the war’s atrocities. The book’s pleasures include cameos of John Crowe Ransom, Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), W. H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and others; gossipy ups and downs of literary life (wounding reviews, grudges and umbrages); and a third-act run of luck, the “late romance” of the title.
Michael Frank’s One Hundred Saturdays (Avid Reader Press) is a richly rendered account of the Jewish quarter of Rhodes and its ancient, unique culture, a community extinguished by the Nazis, told to the author by an elegant and feisty survivor, Stella Levi.
TOM STOPPARD
A Terribly Serious Adventure by Nikhil Krishnan (Profile) sounds like Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and their friends in pursuit of the Heffalump, and so it proves. Under the subtitle Philosophy at Oxford 1900–60 we have Ryle, Ayer, Austin, Hare and friends (and enemies) in the Hundred Acre Wood, trying to have the last word, though it turns out the Heffalump is in Cambridge. The adventure was called linguistic philosophy, and Ordinary Language can hardly convey how much I loved this book. I golloped it down like a pot of honey, then started again.
Austin, whose USP was to draw fine distinctions between near-synonyms, got a book to himself this year. M. W. Rowe’s superb biography, J. L. Austin (OUP), is a dense and very readable 600 pages, 200 of which tell of Austin’s war as an intelligence officer. His close reading of German troop movements was decisive on D-Day. With war’s end it was back to work.
D. J. TAYLOR
Self-consciously “experimental” novels have a habit of not delivering on their promises, but I was riotously entertained by Richard Milward’s Polari-inflected Man-Eating Typewriter (White Rabbit), which, while roaming picaresquely for upwards of 500 pages, somehow manages not to run out of steam. Poles apart, both aesthetically and geographically, was Richard Russo’s Somebody’s Fool (Allen and Unwin), the latest instalment in what now looks like a lifetime spent scoping out the far from promising terrain of Gloversville, Upstate New York. For all the urging of his UK fans, Russo still has no reputation whatever on this side of the Atlantic and it would be nice to see him start getting his due. Matthew Hollis’s elemental yet cunningly wrought Earth House (Bloodaxe) was the best book of poems I read all year and a worthy successor to Ground Water, a debut that turns out to have appeared as long ago as 2004.
COLIN THUBRON
The valedictory memoir of Jonathan Raban, who died in January, is characteristically multi-faceted. In Father and Son: A memoir (Picador), he reconstructs his father’s wartime campaigns from Dunkirk to Tunis and Anzio, using leftover notes and letters, and pairs this with his own survival after a paralyzing stroke. It is a book pervaded by childhood memories of 1940s rural England, by a father who returns from the war and shatters his infant son’s mothered cocoon, and by Raban’s haunting fear, in a rehabilitation ward in Seattle, that he has lost the facility of writing. But in fleeting descriptions of past travel his talents of pinpoint description and worldly acumen survive intact. Above all, these late-life memories, written with the aid of voice dictation software, recall the struggle for recovery by a man doggedly independent and proud.
MARION TURNER
I loved Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto (Fleet), the immersive sequel to Harlem Shuffle. Whitehead again writes a book in three acts, each part densely and idiosyncratically realized. Set in 1970s Harlem, Crook Manifesto is a book about aspiration, crime, family, identity and connectedness. It is very funny, especially in its deadpan juxtapositions of corruption and brutality with the details of running a furniture business. I think Whitehead is one of the best novelists of our time.
My nonfiction book of the year is The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto and Windus). It has everything I want from a nonfiction book: thoroughly researched history, quirky anecdotes and fascinating characters, including astonishing women. Best of all, it is a book about books, written with a beautiful lightness of touch. The chapter titles alone deserve a prize – they include gems such as “G for Glossotypists”, “H for Hopeless Contributors” and “X for Xenomaniacs (and Esperantists)”.
MARINA WARNER
In The Sky Is Falling (Another Gaze), the film-maker Lorenza Mazzetti voices her child self, truant, droll, fantastical and utterly enchanting. From an artless angle of innocence and mischief she witnesses the terminal violence of the fascist presence in Italy, the destruction of her home and the murder of her family. The novel, a lightly fictionalized memoir, first appeared in Italian in 1961 and has now been republished in a fine translation by Livia Franchini, with a perceptive and informed introduction by Francesca Massarenti.
Transcendence is a big word, but I’ll risk it in relation to the effect of Garry Fabian Miller’s images. Adore (Arnolfini) captures the meditative intensity of changing light and colour in his camera-less photographs – stained glass on the page.
The philosopher Vinciane Despret’s Les Morts à l’oeuvre (La Découverte) presents, at a time of inflamed conflicts over history, a nuanced, sympathetic approach to memory and to art’s potential for repair.
A. N. WILSON
Lawrence James’s wonderfully concise The Lion and the Dragon: Britain and China: A history of conflict (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) could not be more timely, and its humane, funny, wise tone is in marked contrast to the vulgar rhetoric of the populists. James tells the story, from the times of the Opium Wars to those of Xi Jinping, with his customary panache. He is particularly good on Mao, but the early, Victorian stuff is also brilliant. In an understated way, his brief mention of Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong is deservedly devastating. It is the most wonderful story, the relationship between China and Britain, these two ancient, strange countries that have almost nil understanding of one another, yet need one another. A copy of this book should be in the Christmas stocking of all British diplomats and politicians who are concerned with the future of their relationship with Xi’s China. Let’s hope it is also available in the People’s Republic.
FRANCES WILSON
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt (New Directions) is, strictly speaking, a book of last year, but it was only this year that it came into my ken and became an obsession. The pleasure begins even before you start reading, because it is, as an object, handsomer and wittier than any other volume on my shelves. A tall, slim, laminated hardback (69 pages divided into 32 sections) with a silver spine, Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston Cremes oozing over the front and a good splash of pink around the title, it looks like one of those school exercise books that you decorate at home with tinfoil and collage. But never judge a book by its cover: this is a brute and savage tale about the art of heartlessness, the folly of editors, verbal precision and mauvais ton. The ending is pure genius: De Witt’s daemon has a will of iron.
ZINOVY ZINIK
Joshua Cohen’s macabre comedy The Netanyahus, republished by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021, has acquired a new harrowing topicality in view of today’s anti-Zionist hysteria. Unlike Cohen’s doomsday merchants, Stefan Themerson (1910–88), in his triple exile from Warsaw to London via wartime Paris, somehow succeeded in dodging the Jewish question altogether. An experimental surrealist poet, novelist, film-maker and philosopher, he and his artist wife, Franciszka, will be remembered as the creators of the Gaberbocchus Press – a homemade Europe in the basement of a Maida Vale flat. Stefan Themerson (Themerson Estate) is a collection of personal reminiscences on his life and work, edited by Jasia Reichardt. In the aftermath of the war Themerson wrote a letter to the Committee of Writers in Exile at International PEN: “Writers are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of refuge, or whatever it is they carry within themselves”.
Knock nock 
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