Vintage Books

For the last few months Anglo-Italian novelist Tim Parks has been writing of his devotion to Italian football club Hellas Verona in The Guardian. In A Season with Verona we get a chance to read the full and absorbing narrative that lay behind those short snippets. In some ways the book is a standard travelogue. In following his lowly Series A team...

Amy Goodman has got the goods on the cowboys ruling the roost and dishing out the spoils of war in Washington. She serves them up here with hard facts and a sharp tongue that has won her legions of fans and a few well-placed enemies. An award-winning journalist with one of the most popular shows on American public radio, she fights daily to expose...

As with dogs, so with gods - by and large, you should blame the owners.' A particular trait, common to all human civilisations, is the worship of non-human entities with followings of devotees who claim that their reverence can transport them to transcendental heights of complete and unfettered love. Do I mean God? No - I mean Dog. Dogs and other...

'Before I turn 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.' - Small ad in the New York Review of Books'Round-heeled' is an old-fashioned term for a promiscuous woman of easy virtue. It's a surprising way for a respectable English teacher of a certain age, with a passion...

Returning to Belfast after a long absense,to attend her father`s funeral.Catherine McKenna-a young composer-remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave,her fastidious,nagging mother,and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time,when the LoyalistsLambeg...

A young woman enters a building in a nameless comtemporary European city. She walks into a waiting room where a dozen people, with briefcases or sheaves of documents, are gathered. She is ushered into a large office where she meets Albert Einstein who is engaged in trying to figure out the equation that explains the universe. He is charmed by her,...