Feeling a little under the weather recently, I searched my bookshelves for a “comfort read”. Something undemanding, entertaining, and diverting. I came across Vengeance by John Banville (when he was still using Benjamin Black as his pseudonym). An old train ticket from 2013 used as a bookmark implied I had read the novel before, though how I might have forgotten the brilliant and shocking opening chapter is something I don’t want to think about too much. It’s a satisfying yarn, set in Dublin in the 1950s and featuring Dr. Quirke, the lonely curmudgeon who is the city’s official pathologist. The suicide of a prominent businessman and the subsequent murder of his partner draw Quirke into the shenanigans of Dublin’s upper middle class, where infidelity, backstabbing, and disloyalty are de rigeur.

Banville’s mystery novels depend to some degree on the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. How does a pathologist get so much latitude to do detective work and never step inside the mortuary or perform a postmortem? No matter. Quirke is a wonderful creation and Banville an exceptionally gifted writer. Vengeance proved to be the pick-me-up I needed.

The short story is an unforgiving form. In the hands of those who mastered it (think William Trevor, for example), it can be the perfect distillation of experience and emotion, but it exposes those who prize a showy style, those who can’t resist the extra word, and those who haven’t learned that subtraction, not addition, is the key to perfecting it.

It would be very unfair to find fault with a writer like Colin Barrett because he hasn’t yet reached the heights attained by the likes of Alice Munro. He’s barely forty years-old, but has already won awards and attracted a lot of positive criticism for his stories. Homesickness is the first collection of his that I have read, and I enjoyed many of the stories very much. The setting is often the small towns and countryside of County Mayo, a place where I have spent some time over the years, and that enhanced the pleasure for me. Having said that, none of the stories made a deep impact, but I’ll be looking forward to what comes next from a talented writer.

There is no way to avoid saying this. No one would have written a biography of Monica Jones if she hadn’t been the long-time friend, some-time lover, and correspondent for nearly four decades of Philip Larkin. She had a largely undistinguished career as a university teacher. She had few friends and was often disliked by colleagues and acquaintances. She was a racist and anti-Semite. Her life was blighted by bitterness, loneliness, and alcoholism. And yet from 1946 to 1985, Monica Jones was arguably closer than anyone to one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. She was the primary beneficiary of Larkin’s will and received on his death all his manuscripts and letters (many of which she destroyed).

John Sutherland, her biographer and one of the UK’s most distinguished literary scholars and critics, was one of Monica’s students in Leicester from 1960 and became her friend. That last part might mystify many readers because, on the evidence of this book, Monica was thoroughly and consistently horrible. But Larkin may have been even worse. I have read at least one biography of him, as well as collections of letters he wrote, not just to Monica Jones but also to his coterie of male friends like Kingsley Amis, so the nastier sides of his personality were familiar enough to me. Sutherland, however, has deepened my dislike of Larkin the man by filling out what we know about his stunted and manipulative personality, his misogyny, and his deceit.

Larkin and Jones might have been well matched in so many ways, but they were very bad for one another. He was a blight on her life for decades. She, though helpful to his poetic output in the early years, was treated appallingly, but lacking the self-confidence to break free from a toxic and deeply damaging relationship she was the co-creator of her own misery.

Celia Paul puzzles me. I find some of her paintings sublimely beautiful and others very crude. Aspects of her personality also puzzle me. She’s clearly a deeply private person, and yet has written two very self-exposing books. She complains that her reputation as a painter has been overshadowed by her relationship with Lucian Freud, but seems to have done as much as anyone to make people aware of that love affair and its consequences. Not that these paradoxes matter (if they are paradoxes); she has produced some wonderful paintings and published two memorable and sometimes beautifully written books.

When she set out to write her imaginary Letters to Gwen John, Celia Paul did so as a homage by one painter to another, not as a conventional biography. Nevertheless, the letters, written between February 2019 and November 2020, reveal a lot about the character and relationships of a deeply private artist whose work during her lifetime (1876-1939) was overshadowed by that of her brother, Augustus John, and her sometime lover, Auguste Rodin. The artistic and personal similarities between Celia and Gwen are striking; the ascetic tendencies in their habits, the absolute dedication to art, the longing to be loved and understood while living entirely on their own terms and in the shadow of great artists.

Few painters, at least in my experience, can write as well as Celia Paul, especially of love, longing, and the solitude on which her art depends. Letters to Gwen John, part biography, part autobiography, and part homage, is a book infused with sadness, vulnerability, and no little nobility.

Fuyuko Irie, a freelance proofreader, spends her days looking for errors in manuscripts. She’s in her mid-thirties, lives alone and is almost entirely friendless. Other women make fun of her, for her drab appearance, for her unsociable nature, and, by implication, for her failure to make the efforts that convention dictates she ought to make: to please the boss, to flirt with men, to make herself prettier, and to follow that unrelenting diet of self-improvement served up in magazines and social media. Is she broken or damaged in some way, or is she simply refusing to play the game? As her isolation deepens and her dependence on alcohol increases, Fuyuko has a chance encounter with the enigmatic Mitsutsuka …

What ingredients need to be present for a happy life? Friendship, love, fulfilling work, purpose? What propels us forward and what sustains us when these are absent or when they stop being enough? Mieko Kawakami doesn’t shy away from important themes, but her delicate and oblique approach to them, her curiosity about how individuals confront or avoid them, and, most of all, the spareness and beauty of her style, make her one of the most interesting novelists at work today.

The imaginative literature provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic will be vast. Novels, essays, poems, and memoirs from those fear-filled days are already in the bookstores, and much, much more is coming. Inevitably, once we’re in a position to look back at that corpus, some of it will look rushed, wrong, and even downright opportunistic. I predict Zadie Smith’s slim volume of essays, Intimations, will stand the test of time. Published in mid-2020, these are thoughts from the earliest days of lock-down and quarantine, not some attempt at a sweeping review of the COVID years.

Intimations is a very personal memoir, and from it emerges a portrait of the author as a compassionate, sane, level-headed, and thoughtful human being in a time of dislocation and fear. I can see myself re-reading some or all of these short essays in the future. There is wisdom and humanity in them.

Lionel Barber was editor of the Financial Times from 2005 to 2019. Even in these times when newspapers are nothing like as powerful as they used to be, being the FT editor gives one access to some of the most powerful people in the world. Barber didn’t keep a regular diary during his tenure, but he has turned his contemporary meeting notes into a sort of journal. He had a ring side seat for many momentous occasions in world events such as the crash of 2008, the rise of Obama (and Trump), Brexit, and much more. Not surprisingly, he writes powerfully of his interactions with the great, the good, and the downright horrible. His list of interviewees and contacts is a roll call of the period’s power players. Putin, Trump, Blair, Obama, and MBS are all seen in close-up, not to mention a coterie of the wealthy and the self-important; Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt, Prince Charles, and Rupert Murdoch all have walk-on parts.

I gulped down The Powerful and The Damned in one day and two flights. It’s that kind of book – gossipy, insightful, indiscreet, and great fun. Barber is an entertaining chronicler of years that were filled with incident, not all of it good. He’s also very interesting on what it took to navigate one of the world’s great media brands in a time of technological transformation in the news industry.

Weather is a collaboration between the author Colm Toibin and the artist Antony Gormley. Is it a short story illustrated by drawings, or a set of drawings enhanced by words? Perhaps it’s both or neither. I tend to think of it as two independent meditations on the experience of weather, one (Gormley’s) from the north Norfolk coastline, and the other (Toibin’s) from Ireland’s east coast.

Weather is a beautiful artifact, and a tribute to the arts of printing and book production. It is published in a regular edition and in a de luxe version by Enitharmon Editions. I had the pleasure of working nearly forty years ago with its founder, Stephen Stuart-Smith. Anyone interested in beautiful editions or artists’ books should take a look at Enitharmon’s catalog.

A lot of cities could learn from Helsinki’s enlightened policies on supporting spaces for art and culture. For a long time the Finns have been investing in striking, modern buildings to house their galleries, museums, and libraries, and, if my recent visit is any guide, the investment is paying off. On a short gap between meetings this week, I made my first trips to Oodi (the Helsinki central library) and, a short walk away, Kiasma (Museum of Contemporary Arts).

One look at Oodi and you know you’re being sent a message. Public libraries matter. And what better way to proclaim their importance than by investing in them and by having the best architects design them?

Much the same is being declared at Kiasma, that part of the Finish National Gallery that houses the contemporary art collection. It opened first in 1998. With its sweeping and curving ramps, it reminded me of the Guggenheim in New York, but this is a place with a character all of its own. Its polished concrete floors and roughly textured white walls are a suitably blank space that allows the artworks to shine. My own visit coincided with ARS22, the tenth installment of an exhibition (first launched in 1961) that aims to present the latest trends in contemporary art. It’s the perfect place to see and experience some of the most challenging and provocative types of art.

Bravo Helsinki!

It was such a privilege to have after-hours access last night to MUNCH, the museum that opened in October 2021 to house the collection of more than 20,000 works gifted to the city of Oslo by the painter, Edvard Munch. I am grateful to the friends who organized it. Walking around near-empty galleries and having time and space to study so many magnificent artworks was an unforgettable experience.

It was also a revelation. I didn’t know how prolific Munch had been or how varied his output was. Paintings, of course, but also lithographs, photographs, film recordings, sculpture, and drawings. The visit deepened my appreciation of an artist with whom I had, up to that point, associated such a narrow range of images and moods (The Scream, of course, being uppermost in my mind). I saw paintings familiar to me, and many others for the first time. My visit, in other words, did all the things I hope for whenever I go to a museum – inform, inspire, educate, move, and enthrall.

Norwegians are very proud of Munch and have expressed that pride in the best possible ways; by building a beautiful and functional home for his art, and by thinking all the time of new ways to show that art to those who know and love it and those who will in the future.