Are we Sleepwalking to Brexit?

Written for Prospect Magazine:   The European Union referendum now lies splayed across the political event horizon like a giant jellyfish with which we are all soon going to have to wrestle. History will explain how Nigel Farage, whom I have interviewed for this magazine, tortured the Conservative Party into wasting the nation’s time and…

Beatlebone by Kevin Barry review – a darkly wry trip to Beatle Island

Written for The Guardian:   My favourite interview with John Lennon was by “whispering” Bob Harris in 1975. Throughout, Harris is the opposite of incisive, but his warm, respectful, almost innocent presence seems to relax Lennon into being unusually open and collusive; sure, the acerbic wit and that compulsive self-awareness are there as always, but in the last few…

Formula One: the limit of human skill

Written for Prospect Magazine:   The greatest sporting spectacle that I have ever witnessed live took place on a day of freezing rain, bitter winds and unimaginable mud in Leicestershire in April 1993. I had come seventy miles across the Pennines with my brother and a friend to camp for the weekend in a wind-ravaged…

Q & A with The Guardian

  This Q & A first appeared here in The Guardian:   How did you come to write The Devil’s Garden? Some years ago, I stayed on a river station on the Amazon with some very odd people. Later, in one of the river towns, a woman told me a story about an anthropologist who disappeared…

Before, During, After review by Richard Bausch – precisely piloted psychology

For The Guardian: This is an accomplished and, at times, harrowing novel full of the kind of psychological power and exactitude that first-rate fiction does so well. I found myself wincing half the time, whispering, wishing, willing the characters to take other courses. For those unfamiliar with Richard Bausch, he has long been celebrated in America as a practised…