Ian Thomson began to contribute to the Telegraph and its sister paper the Sunday Telegraph in the late 1980s. The Telegraph was founded in 1855 and has a close association with the Spectator. Here is a selection of recent reviews and articles:
Ian Thomson remembers the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, whose fiction was deeply rooted in reality.
12 September 2015
Everything is Happening by Michael Jacobs
Ian Thomson reviews an unfinished book about Velazquez’s finest work.
15 July 2015
Ian Thomson: interview with Roberto Saviano
Cocaine and the Mafia.
4 Jul 2015
When the Doves Disappeared by Sofi Oksanen
Ian Thomson reviews a superb new novel on WW2 in the Baltic.
10 May 2015
Ray Davies: a Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan
Ian Thomson on the twists and turns of the Kinks frontman Ray Davies, from Muswell Hillbilly to national treasure.
21 March 2015
Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer by Ann Morgan
6 Feb 2015
Bolaño: a Biography in Conversations by Mónica Maristain …
2 Dec 2014
Roberto Bolano died aged 50 while waiting for a liver transplant in Spain
Did Pasolini predict his own murder?
11 Oct 2014
Early in the morning of November 2 1975, in Idroscalo, a shanty town outside Rome, the 53-year-old Italian film-maker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini …
Haiti returns to the tourist map
27 July 2014
Change cannot come too soon for Haiti; I can’t wait to go back. …
House of Ashes by Monique Roffey, review: ‘knuckle-whitening’
22 July 2014
In 1970, Trinidad was convulsed by Black Power activists who hoped that Africa and African culture would provide an antidote to the …
The Haunted Life and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac, review
19 Mar 2014
Jack Kerouac, an alcoholic malcontent, put the Beat generation on the map with his 1957 novel On the Road. …
Otto Dov Kulka: The most powerful writer on Auschwitz since Primo Levi
27 Feb 2014
In 2011, impressed by some diary fragments Kulka had showed him, the British historian Ian Kershaw encouraged the academic to send a draft manuscript to Penguin in London …
The Private Life, by Josh Cohen, review
18 Nov 2013
Increasingly, cyberspace is where we are judged by others and, on occasion, even destroyed. If this sounds exaggerated, consider how a stranger …
In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge, review
28 Jun 2013
Communist East Germany was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The inhabitants looked cowed and harried; in East Berlin no one dallied outside …
The Last Man in Russia and the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation by Oliver Bullough: review
15 Apr 2013
The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness is familiar to most, even if the hangover seems a cruel price to pay. You could say that alcoholism is …
The British Dream by David Goodhart: review
09 Apr 2013
Britain has a long and noble tradition of sheltering casualties in a totalitarian age. My mother, a Balt whose family was persecuted by Hitler …
Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri: review
27 Feb 2013
In the Western imagination, Calcutta (or Kolkata) is a city shadowed by poverty and urban wretchedness. Mother Teresa made tending to the poor …
11 Feb 2013
Article …
The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam: review
08 Feb 2013
Nadeem Aslam’s harrowing fourth novel unfolds in a fictional town in Pakistan in the aftermath of 9/11. In pages of fine-crafted prose, Aslam …
The Robber of Memories by Michael Jacobs: review
26 Nov 2012
Wonderful memoir by the late Michael Jacobs …