Theo Tait

Cynthia Ozick has been described as one of America’s best writers, one of its leading women of letters, the Athena of its literary pantheon. She has won prestigious awards by the armful: she was recently nominated for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al....

As everyone knows, Sherlock Holmes only appeared to plunge into the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a deadly embrace with Professor Moriarty. In fact, using his knowledge of ‘baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling’, Holmes slipped Moriarty’s grip at the vital moment, watched his nemesis totter then fall, and was planning his next move before the Napoleon of crime had even...

“Behind all these things – status, virginity, animality, muscles – is the controlling Wolfe obsession: homomania. He is, as he says of one of his characters, ‘crazed on the subject of manliness’. Wherever he looks, he sees the struggle for dominance, the tournament, men butting like stags. It’s not just that all human endeavour comes down to this: there is really nothing else, whether on the basketball field or in the classroom or at a family picnic. Women are either willing notches on the bedpost, or else aping the male thing in a confused way. We are all of us forever acting out our machismo, like rappers or wrestlers before the fight, narcissistically preoccupied with an almost abstract display of prowess. Even weedy Adam, in the gym, glances at this own muscles in the mirror: ‘He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels . . . more of a man.’ This is it: the endless struggle for tumescence.”

“Naipaul is often painted as a fearless critic of lazy left-liberal nostrums, a disillusioned scourge of mumbo-jumbo ancient and modern. He’s offering something much simpler here: a calculated affront to the egalitarian and multicultural values of modern Britain. But it’s also far stranger, more personal, and more excessive than that: the term ‘politically incorrect’ doesn’t begin to cover it – ‘politically obscene’ is nearer the mark.”

No one overwrites quite like Patrick McGrath. In a crowded field, he must be British fiction’s most prodigious overwriter. He made his name writing intense, florid novels about ‘wild delusions, ungovernable passions’, ‘insanity and obsessive sexual love’ (his words). But in Port Mungo he has written a book so lush, so fruity, so gorgeous – so in love with...