Christopher Tayler

Let’s​ imagine that after this life, or perhaps before it, perhaps as a step in an endless transmigration of souls, we arrive by ship in a new land. Our memories of a previous existence are washed away. A beneficent but impersonal bureaucracy assigns us names and ages – the ages are apparently chosen by guesswork on the basis of how old we look – and arranges for us...

Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child. ‘Buchan backed up...

Stoner doesn’t read like a bitch-ex-wife novel in which envious cripples conspire against a blameless hero, and one explanation for that is simply that it’s very well done. You’re left with an impression of complete clarity and simplicity and non- trickery, even when the narrator has been shifting artfully between showing and telling, or offering unobtrusive scraps of general wisdom. There’s a feeling that the writer has almost disappeared through his sheer concentration on the task of lighting up a dull, depressing life without letting the reader notice any departure from sober realism. At the same time, you’re aware of Stoner’s life as a kind of fable, a story in which the central character’s fate is settled early on without him noticing, like Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe or a version of It’s a Wonderful Life in which George Bailey lives in Pottersville all along.

Thanks to​ a moment of weakness when the children were small and mice would scatter across the kitchen floor each time I came down to make breakfast, I have two cats. The original pair were brother and sister, but the brother ran away, the sister got pregnant, and the children fell for one of her kittens – a male. We had him neutered and later managed to do the same to his mother....

On 23 January,​ Jacob Rees-Mogg reintroduced the country to the concept of prorogation – the suspension of Parliament by the monarch. Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope...