Ian Thomson has written for the Evening Standard since 1987. In 2009 the London newspaper ended a 180-year history of paid circulation and became free. Here is a selection of recent reviews:
The shanty-town Napoleon with a gold-plated Uzi
10 September 2015
Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio by Misha Glenny
Cocaine – and especially Britain – makes the drugs world go round
23 July 2015
Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano
28 May 2015
The Ginger Line: A Day’s Walk Round the London Overground by Iain Sinclair
The delinquents, vagabonds and insomniacs who tramp London by night …
26 March 2015
Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont
Thursday 07 August 2014
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel goes to the heart of questions about human solitude and yearning to connect
Hensher leads us a very merry dance
Thursday 10 July 2014
Philip Hensher dilates entertainingly on the heady rush of poppers, Weimar Republic anti-Semitism and Dennis Nilsen
A lost boy from Leningrad pinpoints the immigrant’s plight abroad
Thursday 27 February 2014
Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart
Thursday 16 January 2014
Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life by Berel Lang
A spoof in the best tradition of spying
Thursday 12 September 2013
Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe
Blasted love lives and a family adrift in bedlam
Thursday 09 May 2013
Constance by Patrick McGrath
A great and mysterious writer celebrates his influences
Thursday 25 April 2013
W.G.Sebald’s essays. This slender collection of essays, first published in German in 1998, celebrates six figures who have influenced Sebald as a writer. He writes as ever in his trademark allusive prose of the melancholy of cultural displacement and yearning for home – yet the essays do not always translate agreeably into English, thinks Ian Thomson
Thursday 30 August 2012
Ryszard Kapuscinski: A Life by Artur Domoslawksi trans Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Shrapnel, by William Wharton – review
Thursday 09 August 2012
Shrapnel, Wharton’s posthumously published war memoir, divulges a horrific episode from the past. In unsparing detail, Wharton describes a massacre of German prisoners that took place under his command in France at the war’s end.
A land of virtues and misdeeds
Thursday 28 June 2012
Good Italy, Bad Italy: Why Italy Must Conquer Its Demons to Face the Future by Bill Emmott
Thursday 15 March 2012
Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S Burroughs 1959-1974 edited by Bill Morgan
Dante In Love reminds us why Dante remains the patriarch of modern letters
Thursday 02 June 2011
Dante in Love by A.N. Wilson
True courage is battling boredom in Peoria
Thursday 21 April 2011
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Thursday 31 March 2011
Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean by Alex von Tunzelmann
What it is to be Italian today
Thursday 24 February 2011
The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples by David Gilmour
A grim journey to Russia’s dark side in Three Stations
Thursday 03 February 2011
Arkady Renko, the ace Moscow detective, made his debut in the 1981 crime bestseller Gorky Park.
A sympathetic eye on London’s underclass
Thursday 02 December 2010
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac
05 January 2009.
The beat writers and artists of 1950s America let out a breathy “yeah” for bebop and Jackson Pollock.
Delving deep into unstable waters
06 June 2013.
The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare.
13 Jan 2003
Tobias Jones’s superb appraisal of Berlusconi’s Italy, The Dark Heart of Italy
08 April 2002.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s marvellous new novel,The Feast of the Goat, is set in the Dominican Republic during the infamous Trujillo regime.
Fighting for Italy, not for Mussolini
13 May 2002
Sebastian O’Kelly’s biography of an Italian combatant in Abyssinia.
Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard
26 September 2008.
Two thousand years ago, in 79 AD, Pompeii was buried under seven metres of volcanic debris when Vesuvius erupted.
The publisher who blew himself up
13 Nov 2001
Carlo Feltrinelli’s marvellous biography of his father Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Senior Service.
