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Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review – the original ghostbuster

An entrancing biography of Tony Cornell, who displayed a scientist’s commitment to impartiality as he investigated the paranormal

My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend’s house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn’t. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I’d had a brush with the uncanny.

When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain’s most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. His answering machine filled up with pleas to investigate strange happenings around the country: a trawlerman mauled by an invisible hound, a house that bled water, a rural bungalow plagued by fires and expiring pets.

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Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon review – the ex-first minister opens up

Scotland’s former leader addresses conflict with Salmond and rumours of a lesbian affair, but stops short of full disclosure

When the title of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, was first announced, I had my doubts. Partly, of course, it was a touching nod to her late friend, the comic Janey Godley. Godley’s viral Twitter voiceovers of the first minister of Scotland’s press conferences always ended with the catchphrase: “Frank, get the door!”

As a reporter covering her decade in power, however, I’d always found her to be a master of the lengthy, lawyerly obfuscation and the disarming but consequence-free apology. Would she really engage with the questions that overshadowed the final years of her leadership until her shock resignation in 2023? Questions about Alex Salmond’s sexual harassment investigation, the Scottish government’s secrecy during the pandemic, the toxic legacy of her gender recognition reforms, the stalled delivery of some of her flagship policy pledges, not to mention independence itself. And what about that rumoured lesbian affair?

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The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy millieu

AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.

Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys

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Polari prize nominees and judges withdraw after inclusion of John Boyne over gender identity views

800 writers and publishing workers have signed a statement objecting to the LGBTQ+ book prize’s nomination of Boyne, who described himself as a ‘terf’

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

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Where to start with: John Burnside

Seán Hewitt, who introduces a new edition of the Scottish author’s final memoir, guides readers through his landmark works a year on from his death

John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside’s work, it’s grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.

Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.

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Poem of the week: Autumn by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Keats’s famous ode speaks across time and space to a 21st-century Sri Lankan, whose turbulent history catches on its mellow mood

Autumn
(after John Keats)

The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.

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Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biography

The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.

What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.

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‘I’m carrying survivor’s guilt’: Raymond Antrobus on growing up deaf

The poet reflects on his heritage, his new life as a father in Margate – and why his memoir is a call to arms

When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”

Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.

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‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal

There’s a growing appetite for stories from around the globe – if only we can avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes the International Booker nominee

When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti’s book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.

A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country’s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy’s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi’s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region’s border: Basilicata was never saved.

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James Patterson to write book about Luigi Mangione

The crime writer and co-author Vicky Ward will recount murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, and chart ‘young man’s descent from Ivy League graduate to notorious accused killer’

Bestselling crime writer James Patterson and investigative journalist Vicky Ward are writing a book on the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, while actor Dave Franco said this week that he would be “open” to playing accused murderer Luigi Mangione in a biopic if one were to be made.

Mangione is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Thompson, who was shot and killed in Manhattan on 4 December last year.

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