Christopher Tayler

Ian McEwan’s vividly and meticulously imagined novels often focus on characters whose imaginations are either unwholesomely vivid or dryly meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies...

When Toho Studios released Gojira in November 1954, Japanese audiences, according to William Tsutsui, watched its scenes of destruction ‘in respectful silence, sometimes leaving the theatres in tears’. Gojira – or Godzilla, as he came to be known in English – was a fire-breathing dinosaur played by a man in a latex suit, but his destruction of Tokyo wasn’t played...

In Like a Fiery Elephant, his recent biography of B.S. Johnson,* Jonathan Coe writes feelingfully about the perils of too much Eng. Lit. He ‘emerged from the experience of reading English at Cambridge’, he explains in the introduction, ‘imbued with a thriving, unshakeable contempt for anyone who had had the temerity to attempt the writing of literature in the last seventy or...

“’One of the irritations of being a writer,’ de Bernières has said, ‘is that one constantly finds oneself having to get up and go and find a reference book. It might just be a thesaurus . . .’ It just might. De Bernières said this in the course of explaining what drove him to design a small, wheeled bookshelf and, on the evidence of Birds without Wings, the Louis de Bernières Caddy has been subjected to rigorous home testing. People are ‘immanitous’, ‘perseverant’ or ‘inexplicably disculpated’. Istanbul is a place of ‘mommixity and foofaraw’, and de Bernières only manages not to use ‘epiphenomena’ twice by resorting to ‘epiphenomenally’ instead.”

‘Be yourself,’ a beautiful woman called Ipek says to Ka, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s newly translated novel, Snow (Kar, 2002), when he asks how to win her heart. Though kindly meant, it’s discouraging advice to give one of Pamuk’s characters, for whom being themselves is difficult. ‘No one can ever be himself in this land,’ says the shadowy...