John Mullan

Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure Divino (1706). Begun while he was imprisoned in Newgate, its 12 books assailed the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs from every angle he could imagine. The argument mattered very much to him, as...

When we discuss novels, there is nothing easier or harder to talk about than characterisation. Nothing easier, in that unprofessional readers’ expressions of interest or aversion so often fix on a novel’s characters as vivid or pallid, believable or not. Nothing harder, in that academic critics (and their obedient students) have long since learned to steer away from the illusions...

“There is a frankness about Goldman’s pursuit of theme and coincidence. In the novel’s second paragraph we are introduced to a conceit that explains, with untoward explicitness, the continual reappearance of balloons and inflated bladders throughout the book. ‘What if love, earthly or divine, is to history as air is to a rubber balloon?’ Guatemala is an important source of latex, which eventually enables Mack Chinchilla to found a rubber-goods dynasty in New England. Every chapter includes an anecdote about things made from blowing air into rubber. An epilogue asks: ‘What’s more American than balloons? And what’s spookier?’ The stuff that was once ‘a sacred substance to American Indians from Mexico to Brazil’ becomes the material of celebration and idiocy. But also, clearly, rubber is supposed to be like the material of Goldman’s narrative, made to float by human breath.”

Sukhdev Sandhu loves a certain vision of London. He finds it realised in the 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, especially the ‘extraordinary scene’ in which the screen is divided and three attractive couples ‘are all shown fucking’. Here is cinematic confirmation of the city as a place of unpredictable pairings and joyful miscegenation....

“Perhaps here history was decided. The irreversible changes brought about by the Glorious Revolution might have been reversed after all. A Protestant nation with a monarch who exercised his power through grandees and politicians might have become a country with a Roman Catholic king whose right to rule was divinely ordained. The so-called Second Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 has fascinated historians precisely because it dramatises the sheer chanciness of history and undermines the retrospective sense of inevitability that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments.”