Adam Phillips

In Primo Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz If this is a man – written, he says, not ‘to formulate new accusations … rather, to furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind’ – there is an account that is a kind of accusation of a man Levi calls Henri. There are several character sketches of his fellow inmates, but the two pages on...

In the introduction to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though also daunted by the amount of material he had to work with. The bibliography of Russell’s work lists more than three thousand publications, and this doesn’t include the letters he wrote...

Isherwood was a novelist with the inclinations of an autobiographer. There are always characters in his novels who love what he calls ‘playacting’, who charm and flirt and reinvent themselves whenever necessary, and as much as possible. They are such compelling and irreverent storytellers that they help us forget about truth-telling; they make everyone, including themselves, feel...

First of all we have to imagine a world in which people suffer and have no hope that anything or anyone can make a difference. Then we have to imagine what it would be like to live in a world of people who have no wish to help each other or to feel better. If we don’t do this, the history of medicine, and of its country cousin psychiatry, not to mention the history of religion, will hardly seem different from a history of quacks and con-artists ingeniously exploiting the hopelessly vulnerable. The question has always been: what, if anything, can be done? Only when we acknowledge the very real drawbacks of living in a world in which everyone’s unhappiness renders everyone else clueless, can we review our contemporary options and their histories with some sense of relief. We may have very real doubts now about, say, aromatherapy, or ECT, or cognitive psychology – or even about people having personal trainers – but we quite literally have to do something when we begin to feel in some way troubled. It is fortunate that pain has made us so inventive.’

The name is ordinary, so the book announces itself as a book about no one special; though, of course, when men without qualities become the subjects of novels a certain gravity (if not grace) is conferred on them. But even though Mr Phillips is really a book about its title – and about what names entitle people to – the title has to be read in the light of the book’s epigraph. Taken from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, it plays off, as epigraphs must, the title of the novel against the title that is the source of the quotation: ‘Mr Phillips and the Need for Roots’. Tarquin Winot, the now infamous narrator of Lanchester’s previous novel, The Debt to Pleasure, would have enjoyed the portentous solemnity of the epigraph itself: ‘A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatsoever, but he would have obligations.’ Victor Phillips, the eponymous hero of Lanchester’s new novel, doesn’t think of himself as a man of big themes, and so wouldn’t be drawn either to reading about them, or indeed to mocking them. Whether or not Mr Phillips would have been Simone Weil’s cup of tea – the novel that is, the character certainly wouldn’t have been – her line is there as a guide-line, ushering you into the novel once you’ve got past the title. And Mr Phillips is not demanding as titles go; and as novels go it is exceptionally funny and often astoundingly intelligent – but it is quizzical.’‘