John Banville | The New York Review of Books

Henry James’s ‘Dear Native Land’

The writer’s 1904 tour of America left him little less than horrified at what he encountered.

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

by Peter Brooks

The Correction of Taste: On the Late Novels of Henry James

by Denis Donoghue, with a foreword by Colm Tóibín

December 18, 2025 issue

Enigmatic Roger Casement

Roger Casement became internationally celebrated for exposing the horrors of colonialism, yet he remains an elusive figure.

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement

by Roland Philipps

December 5, 2024 issue

‘Live All You Can’

The early lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James were marked by the loss of loved ones, and in their reflections one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives

by Robert D. Richardson, with a foreword by Megan Marshall

March 7, 2024 issue

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism

by John Gray

December 21, 2023 issue

Special Correspondent

As a public man, John le Carré was a model of probity and rectitude; in his private life, he was not above double-dealing.

The Secret Heart: John le Carré: An Intimate Memoir

by Suleika Dawson

A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré

edited by Tim Cornwell

April 20, 2023 issue

‘A God Can Do It’

For Rilke, the artist’s task is to absorb the realm of things and thereby transform it into something rich and strange.

Rilke: The Last Inward Man

by Lesley Chamberlain

November 3, 2022 issue

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

by Jed Perl

April 21, 2022 issue

An Affair to Remember

Julia Parry has mined a trove of inherited letters to write her marvelous, gently elegiac book about the love affair between Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House.

The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen

by Julia Parry

September 23, 2021 issue

Sold!

May 27, 2021 issue

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters

edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen, and Hans Luijten

Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him

by Mariella Guzzoni

May 13, 2021 issue

Letter

John Banville

Sold!

May 27, 2021 issue

No One Gets Out Alive

C’est la Vie

by Pascal Garnier, translated from the French by Jane Aitken

Gallic Noir: Volume 1: The A26, How’s the Pain?, The Panda Theory

translated from the French by Melanie Florence, Emily Boyce, and Gallic Books

Gallic Noir: Volume 2: Boxes, The Front Seat Passenger, The Islanders, Moon in a Dead Eye

translated from the French by Melanie Florence, Jane Aitken, and Emily Boyce

Gallic Noir: Volume 3: The Eskimo Solution, Low Heights, Too Close to the Edge

translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Melanie Florence

April 9, 2020 issue

A Master of Hidden Things

October 24, 2019 issue

Of Terrorists, Tourists, and Robert Frost

The Unnamable Present

by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

September 26, 2019 issue

What Made the Old Boys Turn?

Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

by Richard Davenport-Hines

A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean

by Roland Philipps

March 7, 2019 issue

Letter

William Burr

No Nukes

April 18, 2019 issue

Oscar’s Mum

April 19, 2018 issue

The Impossibility of Being Oscar

He had, throughout his life, talked away too much of his talent.

Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years

by Nicholas Frankel

March 8, 2018 issue

Letter

Barbara Ann Porte

Oscar’s Mum

April 19, 2018 issue

Tender Is the Fall

Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by David S. Brown

November 9, 2017 issue

Ending at the Beginning

‘Kafka: The Early Years’ completes one of the great literary biographies of our time

Kafka: The Early Years

by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch

August 17, 2017 issue

Life as a Burning House

Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

May 25, 2017 issue

The Strange Genius of the Master

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited

by Philip Eade

February 9, 2017 issue