John Sturrock

In the Sunday Times of 1 October, the home secretary was reported as having it in mind to ‘strip some terror suspects of the automatic right to be protected from torture’, should ministers rule that there were ‘overriding considerations of national security’. Knowing as we do that ‘overriding’ here means that considerations so labelled cannot on security...

Of the three books that Gustave Flaubert was able to write only after a lengthy cohabitation with his sources, Bouvard et Pécuchet is by some way the most approachable. The other two are exhibition pieces, admirable for their form but keeping their distance, full as they are of the rare knowledge he had come to by his reading. In La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the desert-dwelling...

Of all the pre-textual bits and pieces lying like speed humps in the road of an impatient reader – epigraphs, ‘author’s notes’, prefaces, expansive acknowledgments to a full address-book of expert peers, talented editors and fond next of kin – the one we are least likely to slow down for is the book’s dedication, a kind thought directed offstage that has...

“It might have been better if George Bush hadn’t been hovering behind Blair’s right shoulder. The sight of the two of them together did a lot to clear the mind of thoughts of the Olympics or even the G8 meeting itself as the motive behind the London bombs, which certainly weren’t let off to show solidarity with the African poor. Far and away the most rational motive was the one that in the immediate aftermath seemed barely able to speak its name: Iraq.”