It’s not easy to do what Helen Dunmore appears to do so effortlessly – write compulsively readable stories about things that really matter.  Exposure, set in London in the early 1960s, draws you right from the first page to its heart:

“It isn’t what you know or don’t know: it’s what you allow yourself to know.  I understand this now.  It turns out that I knew everything.  All the facts were in my head and always had been.  I ignored them, because it was easier.  I didn’t want to make connections”.

Simon Callington, a junior employee at the Admiralty, is married to Lily, a German-born Jewish refugee.  They live a quiet, uneventful, middle-class life with their three young children in north London.  Quiet and uneventful until entrapment and a single moment of unthinking carelessness brings betrayal, disgrace, and imprisonment.

Dunmore chooses the framework of a fairly conventional espionage novel, but only, I suspect, because it suits so well her wider purposes, to explore shifting loyalties, the porous borderland between fidelity and betrayal, appearance and truth.  Her real preoccupation isn’t the traditional tradecraft of spies.  She goes to places more universal than that, into terrain that’s uncomfortable, uncertain, and ambiguous.  She knows that a human life is often an invention, a composite of what we choose to see and what we permit others to see, as well as those more deeply buried parts, covered sometimes in shame, fear, and regret – the pieces that can only be uncovered by love.

Dunmore is a wonderfully insightful writer of clean, precise, beautiful prose.  She has a very loyal following but deserves to be better known.

Every faith has its sacred sites, its places of pilgrimage.  Football is no different.  San Siro, Nou Camp, Wembley:  these are the places the devotees congregate to re-affirm their belief and often to have it tested.  For followers of Réal Madrid, Bernabéu is the Holy of Holies.  I joined 80,000 of them recently on what was my first visit to the stadium to see a game against Eibar.

Faith encourages confession, so let me share a secret with you.  I was a little disappointed.  Not by the stadium, which was impressive enough, but by the faithful whose commitment was less forcefully expressed than I expected it to be.  I grew up watching football in England, where the passion of the fans is intense and relentless.  Dare I say it?  The Madrileños were surprisingly restrained in comparison.  A Spanish friend who joined me blamed the club’s years of success.  That makes sense.  Faith needs to be tested and adversity is the best way to do it.

Few cities live café culture with the flair and passion of Madrid.  If you want to see the Madrileños enjoying it, I recommend you take a trip on any Sunday afternoon to the Barrio de Las Letras.  The neighborhood has had a long association with writers – hence the name – and is filled with cafés, bars, small shops and galleries.  It’s very central and only a few steps from the Paseo del Prado, but it feels quite secluded and self-contained.  Best of all, it feels like a real community, a place where people live and work, not some sterile, artificial “destination”.  Grab a table outside, a beer, a plate of paella mixta, and watch Madrid do what it does better than any city: unwinding with family and friends.

When evening arrives, the neighborhood’s many bars come to life.  I sat at the counter at Cocido de la Sena Daniela, and enjoyed a glass of Rioja and various tapas as I watched people come and go.  At one end of the bar a child, no more than six months old, sat on his mother’s lap, grinning and beating on the bar with his chubby fists, while at the other end a distinguished, elderly man, perhaps a widower, nursed his cognac.  Immediately beside me, a young woman slid to the edge of her bar stool so that she could lean in more closely and kiss her boyfriend. That’s Las Letras – a place everyone can find their place.

I had a picture-perfect day for my visit to these beautiful cities in Castile and Leon.  Warm sunshine and blue skies, just right for strolling around their ancient streets.

Segovia is a UNESCO world heritage site.  It’s a place crammed with architectural treasures.  A stunning Roman aqueduct dating from the end of the 1st century CE, scores of Romanesque churches, monasteries, and convents, even a castle that inspired Walt Disney – far too many to list here.  One place stood out for me among the memorable sights: the Iglesia de la Vera Cruz.  More of a shrine than a conventional parish or monastic church, it’s set some way out of the city on a lonely road.  It was consecrated in 1208 and built by the Templar Knights to house a fragment of the “true cross”.  Modeled on the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, it’s a very unusual piece of church architecture with its twelve-sided structure and multiple apses clustered around the tower.

Segovia is a seductive city that opens itself up slowly once you get away from the larger squares and walk around its narrow, often empty lanes and side streets.  It’s somehow a place of real warmth, somewhere that slows you down and quietens you.  Long after the architecture has slipped from my memory, the early autumn sunshine on the sandstone buildings will be what I remember.  That and a pilgrimage to have a lunch of cochinillo (suckling pig) at one of Spain’s gastronomic shrines, Mesón de Cándido.

Avila, by contrast, has no interest in seduction.  It looks to intimidate and impress, as it has for centuries, with its perfect fortified walls and granite buildings. It’s an austere place, beautiful and imposing; a reminder of the hardships of Spain’s past.

All credit to Spain’s national, provincial, and local governments for preserving such special places with great care.

I listened this evening to a conversation between people who know a lot about restaurants and bars.  Ruth Rogers, who has run for nearly thirty years the outstanding restaurant (The River Café) she co-founded with the late Rose Gray; Nemanja Borjanovic who, with his girlfriend, gave up a career in finance after a spontaneous stopover in San Sebastian and started his own place in London (Donostia) to pursue his love of Basque food; and Alice Lascelles, who writes about bars and drinks for the Financial Times.  The occasion was the London launch of The Monocle Guide to Drinking & Dining.

They talked so passionately and humorously about how it’s communities that build great restaurants and bars and that it’s restaurants and bars that build great communities.  They talked about how we use food and drink to celebrate love: our love for our partners, friends, families, and businesses.  They were scathing about formulaic, cookie-cutter restaurants and food fads, and excoriated the “turn a quick buck” mentality that almost always ends in commercial failure.  They all celebrated the essential ingredient for success: not the celebrity guests, not the critics, not the bloggers, not the tourists, but the “regulars”: the people who live within a mile of the restaurant and visit once a week.

There were many American restaurateurs and chefs in the audience, all of them from Los Angeles or New York City.  Several of them asked questions and all of them complained about the conditions – high rents, short leases, clients less interested in food than fads – that made long-term success so difficult in their native or adopted cities.  Many were resigned to a future (at best) of short-term, serial successes, something none of them wanted and all of them would have gladly traded for feeding and nourishing real established communities.  They feared for the future of great, simple, and honest food and of authentic restaurants, but most of all they feared the disappearance of the diverse and permanent urban communities necessary to sustain them.

After a really thought-provoking evening, there was only one thing to do: eat and drink.  I chose Daylesford, a London outpost of an organic farm in Gloucestershire.  I like to think the panelists would have approved.

I was seven or eight years old when my father started taking me to football matches.  We lived a short bus ride from both Highbury and White Hart Lane, so it should have been Arsenal or Spurs that won my loyalty and affection, but George Best had other ideas.  Almost single-handedly that absurdly talented and glamorous player was responsible for tying me for life to Manchester United.  One afternoon with my father at Highbury watching Best, Charlton, Law, and the others and I was swept into the community of Reds, part of the vast diaspora of fans living far from Old Trafford.  I went to the stadium a few times in 1977 when I lived near Manchester, but for most of my life I’ve followed my team through television and through the occasional away game.

An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so I guess it’s no big surprise that my two sons are loyal to United and join me on the sofa most Sundays between August and May to watch their team play.  They’ve seen some of the new generation of United stars play in a pre-season U.S. tour, but they haven’t experienced something an American stadium can never replicate, the unforgettable and uniquely tribal sound of 70,000 or more diehard United fans willing their heroes to victory at The Theatre of Dreams.  I’ve been planning for a long time to do something about that.  As the journalists used to say, watch this space …

Football in the late 1960s wasn’t the big business it is today.  No replica shirts, just woolen scarves and silly bobble hats.  No VIP seats, no seats at all, just terraces of chanting men and boys.  I don’t much like the bogus nostalgia for those times that you often hear.  The experience of watching football today is a lot more comfortable than it was fifty years ago and with the decline of fan violence it’s certainly a lot safer for kids.  My sons will never know what it was like to stand on terraces in the freezing cold for two hours, wearing a rosette and carrying a rattle, but maybe they’ll get something I have and all football-crazy boys should have: the precious memory of being with their Dad and in the company of their idols.

It’s a small, élite group: the authors whose books I always buy as soon as they are published.  It’s a group that changes from time to time.  I used to wait impatiently for new novels by the likes of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, but no more.  At some point they went to places I didn’t want to go.  I’m sure I feel the loss more than they do.  Inevitably and occasionally the group gets diminished by inconveniences (major for the author, less so for me) such as death.  No more novels from John McGahern, Brian Moore, P.D. James, and Iris Murdoch.  That’s a sad thought.  No matter; sometimes someone new joins the group, someone like Julian Barnes, and that’s enough to banish the blues.  I found Barnes’ earliest work dry and self-regarding, but more recent books have been wonderful.  He’s changed and so have I. *

Ian McEwan is in the group, no question, and has been for more than thirty years.  That’s not to say he doesn’t test my patience and loyalty from time to time.  He’s written one or two real duds in his long career.  Sweet Tooth, for example, or On Chesil Beach (which a friend whose taste I respect thinks is among McEwan’s best ever work).  I always forgive him.  Why wouldn’t I?  He gave me The Comfort of Strangers, Atonement, Saturday, and many more that I’ll be re-reading for years to come.

I’d heard before buying Nutshell that the story’s narrator was a fetus.  Call me unadventurous if you must but that made me nervous. Cute idea, I thought, but maybe too cute?  But hey, this is McEwan.  He’s in the group, he’s got some credit in the bank, let’s suspend criticism and see where he takes me.  Our fetal narrator, just a few short weeks from birth, hears his mother plotting to kill his father.  And guess who’s the co-conspirator?  The father’s brother, keen to get his hands on some valuable real estate.  If you’re getting echos of Hamlet, don’t be surprised.  The parallels are explicit and quite deliberate.

There’s some lovely writing here and, perhaps surprisingly given the somewhat grand guignol plot, some very funny passages. I don’t usually think of McEwan as a comic writer, although there’s some very dark humor in some of the early novels, but there’s a light, deft touch in Nutshell that I liked a lot.  That said, it’s not one of his greatest works.  It reminded me of one of those pieces a great pianist might give as an encore, designed to show off the performer’s mastery of technique.  A delightful and charming crowd-pleaser, but not the magnum opus you wanted to hear.  Nutshell may not add much to his corpus but McEwan’s place in the group is safe, at least for now.

*Perhaps you’re wondering who else is in the group.  Haruki Murakami, Graham Swift, and Colm Toibin for sure, perhaps one or two others.

Exactly ten years ago today I moved from London to New York.  My memories of the first few days in Manhattan are unusually vivid and surprisingly sensual.  I remember opening my eyes very early on my first morning, a Sunday.  The sirens from the fire trucks on West 57^th Street might have woken me, but I don’t think so.  It was excitement, the delicious illusion that anything was possible and everything was achievable, a feeling that every immigrant has known.  I recall getting up and walking around the immediate neighborhood, surprised that the city that never sleeps likes to stay in bed on Sunday mornings.  I walked endlessly and everywhere for the sheer pleasure of it, picking a couple of new neighborhoods every weekend.  Subways, cabs, buses, trains and ferries would come later. Ten years on, I realize that my mental map of the city took shape in the long walks of those first few weeks. Like generations of new immigrants, I fell in love with New York.

Ten years on, the love affair has cooled.  Now I see the city’s flaws more than I see its charms and find myself comparing it unfavorably with other, older loves, especially London, the city in which I was born and raised.  Hoping to find New York’s substance, I try to look beneath the shiny lacquer that the city wakes up and re-applies every morning, but often uncover only things it wants to hide, things the world needs less of: greed, aggression, directionless energy, and vanity.  More and more Manhattan feels to me like a place for the young and the immature –  monochrome, uniform, and sometimes just plain bland.  The city imitated by so many (Shanghai and Hong Kong among others) has been surpassed by its progeny and feels old and tired in comparison.

No matter.  I’ve had ten very happy years in what is, for better or for worse, my adopted home, and I plan to have many more.  The early morning sunshine slanting through the east window in Grand Central still stops me in my tracks.  Who cares someone was stupid enough to allow an Apple store to open directly beneath it?  Well, I care, but what can you do?  New York loves money more than beauty, always has, and always will.

I was given The Complete Works of Primo Levi as a birthday present.  It wasn’t a surprise gift: in fact I was shameless about dropping hints.  I’m so glad I did.  It’s a beautiful set, three volumes and nearly three thousand pages, a tribute to the art and craft of publishing and a fitting monument to a wonderful writer.

Primo Levi’s fame, his reputation, and his status as one of the leading figures of 20th century literature derive to a great degree from his searing account of the year he spent in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man.  This collection reveals how much more there was to Levi.  Levi the poet, the essayist, the endlessly curious traveler to the heart of the human condition.

Primo Levi died in 1987, most likely by his own hand.  Although his simple gravestone bears only his name, the years of his life, and the sequence of numbers tattooed on his arm by the Nazis, 174517, these books are the most fitting memorial the world could have given to a great writer and an even greater man, a definitive collection of the gifts he gave to us.

A print of this photograph by Dorothea Lange hangs on my office wall.  It means a lot to me, but not because it’s some kind of memento of, or statement about, my becoming a U.S. citizen last year – something visitors to my office sometimes assume.

The picture was taken in Oakland, CA in March 1942, but the banner you see on the storefront was  placed there on December 8th, 1941 – the day after the strike on Pearl Harbor.  Look carefully at the business owner’s name painted on the window.  Mr. Wanto, a graduate of the University of California, was forcibly evacuated and his business shuttered, and he was interred with thousands of Americans for the duration of the war for no other reason than that he was of Japanese descent.  His banner – unbearably poignant – is at once a protest, a defense, an explanation, and a plea to the conscience of his neighbors.  The words don’t contain even a trace of the pride we usually associate with them.

In 2016, a year when one of our Presidential candidates demonized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers and routinely abused Muslim citizens, can we expect to see banners like these appearing in other parts of the country, as Americans born outside the country or to parents born outside the country are forced to defend their status and allegiance to their neighbors?  Public discourse in this election season has been unusually poisonous, but none of us should tolerate our politicians deciding if some citizens are “more American” than others.  “I am an American” is a phrase that ought to speak to the values that unite us.  Used any other way, it betrays everything the country represents.