Dear H,
A friend who is a literary critic at a New York newspaper sought information related to an article he was writing about the state of book reviewing. At one point in the piece, he said, he wished to compare the situation in the US book world (it seems appropriate here to invoke the recent closure of the Washington Post’s free-standing review section) with that in Britain. Could I estimate the number of London newspapers that run book reviews worthy of the name? And would it be safe to say in the finished article that ten or more daily and Sunday papers operate out of the capital?
There are several newspapers in which a roughly speaking serious author might hope for a roughly speaking serious review. The dailies are: the Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. Sunday brings the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Sunday edition of the Telegraph, once a separate paper with its own staff but now part of a combined seven-day operation. Each of these journals takes a well-intentioned approach to book reviewing, as do the two prominent weeklies, the New Statesman and the Spectator. The Times Literary Supplement, which came out every week for 123 years, went down to fortnightly publication in 2025. Even so, it and the monthly Literary Review are more comprehensive in their coverage than any newspaper. A typical edition of the Literary Review contains around fifty reviews of good quality, with first-person columns fore and aft. The fortnightly London Review of Books seldom has more than a dozen reviews and is more idiosyncratic in its scope (and more politically slanted) than the others. Surveying the field, an expectant author with past form might hope for some reasonable comment on the forthcoming book.
Put that way, it sounds like a healthy state of affairs. (The other papers—the Sun, Daily Record, Daily Express and their Sunday offshoots—are not places to look for literary criticism.) The main departure from the situation of twenty-five years ago, I suggested to my New York friend, is that those who oversee books pages in the London papers nowadays are unlikely to be persons of literary achievement in their own right, as once was commonly the case. In addition to matters of taste and instinctive matchmaking, an editor with some well-received work in the bag is more likely to entice quality writers. Terence Kilmartin, a translator of Proust, was in charge at the Observer for over thirty years, into the mid-1980s; his deputy was Blake Morrison, who had stepped up from the TLS and was already a poet and critic of distinction. Who the Observer’s books editor (a reduced classification in itself) is today I couldn’t tell you offhand. The post of deputy literary editor at such a journal was once prestigious in itself. When I first wrote for the New Statesman in the late 1970s, Martin Amis was literary editor, with Julian Barnes as his deputy. The biographer Claire Tomalin was in charge at the Sunday Times. When the novelist and playwright David Caute took over at the Statesman, Barnes transferred to become her deputy. No disrespect is intended in saying that not a single English paper today has a figure comparable to any of those in charge of literary matters.
In the first decade or so of the present century, the Guardian Saturday Review was far and away the best free-standing books and arts supplement. It was partly modelled on the TLS of the time. The chunky Review was the type of thing one might file away after reading. The editor was Annalena McAfee, now a novelist in her own right. Her regular team included Barnes, James Fenton, Ian Jack, Colm Tóibín, Jeanette Winterson, and Ms. McAfee’s husband Ian McEwan.
This was more than a parade of celebrities. Offering a platform to writers of the first rank week after week naturally raises the level of a nation’s literary journalism. With the TLS on one flank, the LRB on the other, and decent coverage in the papers I’ve mentioned, a fertile critical atmosphere was created, grounded in the humble book review. That is now gone, and the surprise is how little the people left behind appear to care about it. The Guardian’s literary coverage today is openly guided by identity recognition, primarily racial and sexual. But the answer to my friend’s question would none the less be yes, there are more review pages with nationwide reach on this side of the Atlantic, proportionately speaking. Having said that, the critical quality at its best is superior in the US. British books pages are less stringently edited than their transatlantic counterparts. A review in the Wall Street Journal, for example, will cross the desks of two, maybe three editors, with the same number of proofs forwarded to the author for consultation. On major American newspapers, subeditors live in fear of allowing an error to slip through. In Britain, they say with a shrug that someone will write a letter.
I haven’t mentioned online-only coverage. The topic is beyond my grasp here. I am aware, of course, that bountiful nourishment is to be found in that vast sea and often benefit from it. Yet I have no hesitation in keeping faith with the physical journal or book. The electronic browser is at the mercy of the daily tidal wave, with its cascade of flotsam and jetsam; the print-and-paper reader is more able to choose where, when and how to sail.
*
The term “special relationship” is much bandied about over here in discussion of transatlantic relations. It is less vital in politics today than some British politicians claim, but it endures in the publishing and literary worlds for the simple reason that Britain and America have a language in common. A peculiar fact: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novel from which all American literature derives, if you believe the Hemingway of Green Hills of Africa, was first published in London—by Chatto & Windus in 1884. A British book of comparable fame, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, came out in the US before Britain. Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella was issued by Scribner’s in January 1886, a few days before its appearance in Britain. For those who like that kind of thing, here’s another: both these titles are apt to have the definite article attached—“The Strange Case of . . .”; “The Adventures of . . .”—though it doesn’t belong in either instance.
Arthur Miller had a special relationship with Britain late in his life, when his plays enjoyed a welcome in London’s West End that he no longer expected them to receive on Broadway. Miller said as much when I interviewed him at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 2003 (for the Guardian Saturday Review, as it happens). Whether or not it remains the case, I couldn’t say, but London still likes Miller. A run of the middle-period play The Price at the delightful Marylebone Theatre near Baker Street Tube station was extended in the summer after a slew of enthusiastic reviews and the resulting demand for tickets. The Price has been revived four times in Britain since 2018, even though it is not among Miller’s best-known plays.
A few days before going to the theatre, by neat coincidence, I turned the last page of The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James—an exemplar of the special relationship in his own person. The two works have a similar set-up and share a theme: family conflict. James’s novel is based in London and its environs, while the action of The Price takes place in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone on the point of being torn down. At stake in each are the familiar contents of a beloved dwelling—“the spoils”—when the time has come for the residents to leave the past behind and take life’s next step.
It is not hard to see why British audiences like Miller’s dramas. For one thing, he prefers contemplation of moral behaviour to the sneer, typically class-related, that is often heard from the “angry” English playwrights who followed in his wake. Miller is largely free from cynical irony. My first exposure to his work came from a production of The Crucible at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre when I was scarcely out of my teens. The vision of John Proctor ripping up the false confession of complicity with the Devil that would have preserved his life still chills my blood. Or should that be warms?
The action of The Price similarly unfolds against a criss-crossing network of dilemma and conscience. The title has varied meanings. Two brothers—one successful in his career, the other not—come together for the first time in sixteen years to decide the fate of the furniture in the condemned apartment. The first act at the 200-seater Marylebone was enlivened by a virtuoso comic performance by Henry Goodman as the nonagenarian antiquities dealer, Solomon. The audience chuckled even when he shuffled his feet or widened his eyes, as he counselled and maybe conned the unlucky first brother and his wife. The dimming of the interval lights was greeted by tumultuous applause. With the second act comes the arrival of the successful brother—and the beginning of strife. The wiseacre Solomon disappears into an offstage room, and the cordial atmosphere is replaced by a sour one. In the time it takes to say “Kindly return to your seats,” a comedy has become a tragedy. The brothers shout too much, at too great a volume. Neither comes away the winner. At the final curtain we see only Solomon, totting up the profits from his wooden acquisitions—the price—and giving way to hysterical laughter.
We left the theatre at 10:30 on a temperate evening and wandered into neighbouring Regent’s Park. The play has remained in my mind. But is it for the brothers’ shouting match about filial treachery and the absence of parental love in the house that until yesterday meant so much, or for Solomon’s redeeming presence amid the discord?
*
Many British people feel a special relationship to Winston Churchill. Coverage of his exploits can leave the impression that he—and we—won the Second World War single-handedly with minimal assistance from Americans and Russians (among others). An opinion poll conducted today would place him far higher in the nation’s esteem than Sir Keir Starmer, the deposed prime minister, who has been beleaguered from the moment he entered office in July 2024 and is almost certain to be replaced by Andy “Man of the People” Burnham, Mayor of Manchester. Churchill is credited with all sorts of witty things that he likely never said or wrote. Among my favourites is “Do not trust any statistics you did not fake yourself.” It doesn’t much matter whether he uttered it or not.
Yet Churchill had his “wilderness years,” notably from 1945, when he lost a general election and was ousted from No. 10 Downing Street, in spite of having emerged victorious against Hitler. The political void lasted until 1951, when he succeeded in being elected as prime minister of the Conservative Party for the second time. To console himself for his electoral defeat, after he, Roosevelt and Stalin had carved Europe into communist and non-communist states, Churchill took to painting. He had done the same thing at the end of the First World War to help come to terms with the disastrous Dardanelles campaign and the consequent defeat at Gallipoli for which, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was partly responsible. His wife Clementine said about the Dardanelles failure, “I thought he would die of grief.”
Churchill kept up the hobby throughout his long life. An exhibition of his work is on show until November at the magnificent Wallace Collection, in Manchester Square near Oxford Street. There are pictures of lavish rooms at this palace or that one; others of lakes and seas in different countries—Churchill was captivated by the form and formlessness of water; a half-decent try at some Van Gogh-like trees twisting in the wind; and a few paintings which evoke the Impressionists, whom he admired above any other school. A bathing scene from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the west coast of France, seen from above, with a crescent formed by colourful parasols and beach tents, made me think momentarily of Pissarro. A verdant pond with goldfish and green shoots might be by Monet, if viewed from a sufficient distance.
The last phrase isn’t intended sardonically. Churchill’s paintings are not masterpieces—no one would expect them to be—but they are “not bad.” A large part of their interest naturally lies in the fact that many were made by a famous politician and military figure in times of international conflict. He liked to give them away, to friends, to country-house hosts, and on one occasion to Roosevelt. Churchill was astute enough as a painter to be able to write of his attempts to capture the sheen of water: “The fleeting light imposes a rigid time-limit [for brushwork]. The same light never returns.” He took tips from successful artists such as Walter Sickert, from whom he learned the benefits of using photographs as the basis for a painting, and the Irish-Scottish artist John Lavery. The first work in the exhibition depicts Lavery at his easel. Next to it is Lavery’s own portrait of Churchill, likewise in a white smock and at the easel. A picture with as much life as any other on show is Bottlescape, an array of different-sized bottles of booze on a table, including champagne and whisky, with a glass here and there ready to receive some.
As well as being a painter and a politician, Churchill was a writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, the year before Hemingway. In the early 1920s he wrote two magazine articles in which he stated frankly that he had taken up painting as a form of therapy to help him recover from his military miscalculations. Taken together with the bottles and cigars—every photograph on display shows Churchill with a cigar, and we learn that he sometimes sipped Johnnie Walker whisky while he painted—it probably helped. The essays were reissued in 1948 as a book, Painting as a Pastime.
*
I am not immune to the advantages of the internet, but I feel that too little attention is paid to one of its major disadvantages. In this era of profuse informational overflow, something precious has been lost: the pursuit of rarity and the joy of “finding out.” When everything is available at the merest click—the book you’ve long coveted, the song you feared you might never hear again—the thrill of tracking down an elusive treasure is missing.
But not entirely. I read recently of a work of art I have long prized that it is “one of London’s best kept secrets.” Read it where? On the internet, of course. Even so, the set of murals painted by Jean Cocteau in a small chapel in the church of Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place, a few steps away from the Babylon that is Leicester Square, excites me each time I see it. Over the years, I have led numerous people up the steps and through the entrance to the attractive, circular church. No one has ever said they knew about the Cocteau chapel before.
The mural comprises three panels, which show the Annunciation, the Crucifixion and the Assumption of the Virgin, all done with minimal colour in characteristic broad brush-lines. Cocteau painted the scenes in November 1959, when in London to see the English publisher Peter Owen. This best-kept secret appears to have been withheld almost entirely from Francis Steegmuller, whose otherwise admirable biography of Cocteau, published in 1970, makes one passing mention of the church of Notre Dame de France. The reader of Steegmuller’s book is offered a dubious detail about the cooperation of the “prostitutes of the neighborhood” in the project but does not learn the subject of the murals.
The Crucifixion shows only the nailed feet of Jesus at the base of the cross, with wall-eyed Roman centurions looking upwards. A game of dice has been in progress while Christ’s earthly blood drains away. The Virgin and Mary Magdalene weep jewel-like tears. They and another female figure are wrapped in a single shroud. To the right of them is a long-haired man in distress, possibly one of Christ’s apostles filled with remorse. The sun has turned black. At the lower left of the main panel is a self-portrait of the sorrowful artist. The recognizable Cocteau signature bears the date “1960,” though the murals were done the year before.
If leaving one of the Chinatown restaurants, you can easily divert to Notre Dame, which remains open until 9:00 p.m. Once trustingly unprotected, the chapel is now sealed off behind a Perspex screen, for which we can thank climate activists who took to throwing cans of soup over works of art in the nearby National Gallery. May they repent while decorating the walls of their cells.
Cocteau was one of my first loves as a twenty-year-old reader of French fiction. I’ve re-read Les Enfants Terribles many times, in Rosamond Lehmann’s translation and in the original, and have watched the comparatively mundane film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1950. While I am prepared to admit that I don’t thrill to the novel as I did once, the sense of wonder comes to life whenever I spot the book in a second-hand bookshop or hear the title spoken. If asked tomorrow for my three favourite French novels, I would probably name Les Enfants Terribles as one of them—even though it no longer is.
*
Ambling along a West London pavement the other day, I reflected on the ceaseless unrolling of so-called cycle lanes throughout the city. So-called because cycling, in the traditional sense of the verb, involving legwork, has given way to battery powered momentum with no need for any lower-body effort at all. Many an urban thoroughfare in London has been converted into a two-lane blacktop of the new kind: one lane for bicycles, which is often deserted, the other for cars, now twice as busy as before. Motorized two wheelers of the familiar sort—that’s to say, motor bikes or riders on scooters of the kind made by Vespa—are obliged by law to wear helmets, to carry a license, pay road tax, ensure their vehicles are legally road-worthy, and eventually to sit a test. None of this applies to the e-bike which, if spotted on this two-lane blacktop—a typical one is the A40 slip road leading to Paddington—is likely to be overtaking the cars and vans endeavouring to remain within the 20-mile an hour limit. Some disregard the cycle lane altogether and use the pavement instead. In London I am often a pedestrian, occasionally a four-wheel driver. Either way, I have to be constantly on guard, especially at night, against the biker in the black balaclava doing thirty miles an hour with no headlamp.
For years now, cyclists have attracted public sympathy as the most vulnerable of road users, but as a community or “family” (the trendy word), they are unappeasable. The traditional, pedalling cyclist usually wears a helmet, to which a tiny camera is likely to be attached. It is there in case he gets into a spat with a motorist, so that he might capture the alleged offence and use the film as evidence. There is a certain virtue-signalling involved in even the presence of such spyware, prompting a question or two in my mind as I hope to dodge the latex-clad athlete on a mission to break the world land speed record. The one I would ask first—if only they’d slow down—is: Did you just film yourself crashing through that red light?
James Campbell