Review 31's Books of the Year 2025
by Review 31
Above all, the domestic recovery has held strong: if we count the Anglo-Canadian-Hungarian David Szalay — and surely we must — our list contains six UK authors (Szalay, Sean Ashton, Alex Pheby, Nicola Barker, Imogen Cassels, the late Sally Carson). This is a rise of 20% on last year. Britons therefore constitute 42.86% of the list; if we extend this to include those who are also UK-based (Ireland's Eimear McBride lives in London), then this figure is 50%. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, talks constantly of getting Britain moving; of boosting innovation and ‘turbocharging’ growth. She would do well, instead of Treasury briefings and OBR forecasts, to study Review 31’s Books of the Year.
Yann Chateigné Tytelman, Blackout (Les Fugitives)
In an age of literary hybridity, it's not unusual to decide a work of non-fiction is sui generis, but there's no more apt phrase to describe Yann Chateigné Tytelman's short memoir-monograph, Blackout. In taut paragraphs that explore notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art, Tytelman weaves in a portrait of his father, who died ten years before, but whose presence he suddenly feels during the first Covid-19 lockdown. 'Was it the isolation, the disease, or the omnipresent fear which brought me back to your absence? No, I remember. It was you, one day, who came back. Without a word, you appeared to me.’
A builder by trade, the author's father lived an unexamined life of manual work that his son couldn't wait to escape: ‘I didn't want my back to give out, my nose to bleed, my feet to suffer like yours did'. Tytelman becomes an academic and an art historian, but like Hamlet hearing the imperative spoken by his father's ghost ('Remember me'), his own father won't let him go. He's gripped by the need to write to him, to explore what went wrong in their own tenuous relationship before it's too late. But for the past to be properly examined, he suggests, you need silence and zero unnecessary stimulation.
This meditative state is provided not only by the eerie quiet of successive lockdowns, but by engagement with art, which ranges from David Toop's Ocean of Sound to Rauschenberg's White Paintings. On Eno's Music for Airports, Tytelman is particularly eloquent: 'ambient music tints the space in which one listens. Just as painters' pigments dissolve into the binder, so music diffuses through the air and colours the silence'. Similarly, on Emily Dickinson's obsessive sending of her poems into the void to a myriad correspondents: 'This infinite, invisible silence makes us afraid. It may be mysterious to us, but it is necessary.’
It's not insignificant that Tytelman has just become a father himself when memories of his own father come at him unbidden. It begins an enquiry into what it means to pass on tradition, to impart knowledge, or codes of conduct to your own son, and whether this is possible when you discover you are both very different. How you leave things, he suggests, is all important. The scene of his father's cremation is one of the most moving pieces of writing I’ve read all year: 'I wanted to make it all stop but it was too late. I wanted to shout, "Wait, I’ve changed my mind!" I want to see you, to lean over your body. I want my tears to fall onto your forehead and flood your face'.
Brought to us via an impeccable, supple translation from the French by Clem Clement, Blackout is a superb meditation on isolation, grief and filial love, one that deserves to be read and re-read, preferably in a quiet room where you can finally hear yourself think.
Jude Cook
Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, Mother River (Open Letter)
I used to think Can Xue’s writing was the work of the most unusual imagination. I still think this, though the more I learn about her life, her singularity is entirely qualified. She spent much of her childhood in a hut at the foot of Yueyusban Mountain, where her parents had been sent during the Cultural Revolution. Later she worked as a 'barefoot doctor' and a metalworker. After giving birth to her son, she started a tailoring business with her husband. In 1985, aged 32, she published her first story.
What is so appealing about a collection of stories by Can Xue over her novels is that the reader gets not one but, in Mother River, 13 of her remarkable ideas and the shape they take. Nothing can quite prepare you for what comes. For me, reading Can Xue is allowing for the walls in my head to be rearranged, sometimes several times over the course of a story.
In the collection’s title story, a young man, Yuaner, is in awe of a fisherman a few years his senior, Meng Ha. He sets out to learn fishing but is disappointed by how few fish there are to catch in the river. Odd, he reflects, for a place called Fishing River Village. Much like how the author was often left in the care of her grandmother as a child, the story plays out while Yuaner’s parents are away, visiting the tombs of relatives in a neighbouring county. During this time the rather mysterious Uncle Jun stays with Yuaner, cooking with the boy and teaching him about spherical maps.
What do we need to be fully present and experience profound connection to what surrounds us? Meng Ha teaches Yuaner, mostly through his disappearances, that fishing isn’t about catching fish so much as forming a close relationship with the river. Through the year, this has made me think a lot about what it means to be an editor and writer as a way of being, as singular identities, really, connected to distinct rivers. As Uncle Jun tells Yuaner, ‘Life is short. I try to stay awake as much as I can’, just to enjoy it all.
Denise Rose Hansen
Vincenzo Latronico, trans. Sophie Hughes, Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Perfection, the fourth novel by Vincenzo Latronico and his first to be translated into English, follows expat couple Anna and Tom, who relocate to Berlin from an unspecified southern European country in the early 2010s to work as digital creatives. A tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, Perfection begins with a detailed description of Anna and Tom’s Berlin apartment with its petrol blue upholstery, ‘jungle of low-maintenance, luxuriant plants’, stacks of Monocle and New Yorker back issues and collection of LPs.
The reader is given no equivalent description of Anna and Tom themselves; and although the narration sometimes offers up what they are feeling — ‘they worried they were content merely being contented’ — you are never let inside their heads to hear their thoughts directly. The implicit reason for this is that Anna and Tom do not have much of an inner life to share. They are a couple who live on the surface of things — attending exhibitions despite having little in interest contemporary art, cooking the international, photogenic Instagram cuisine of ‘shiny emerald avocados’; and browsing in sex shops to play at ‘being the kind of couple who knew enough about vibrators to compare them . . . relishing that image of themselves even if it didn’t really suit them.’
While the death of Berlin as an artistic hub has been proclaimed regularly for the last decade and a half, Latronico’s target is not the city itself. Perfection could have been set in Bogotá, Lisbon or any other city favoured by digital nomads. Instead, his cool narration takes aim at the shallowness of life lived through a screen — the globalised (Americanised) amalgam of trends, stripped of any connection to their place of origin. It’s a cutting portrait of modern spiritual malaise that never directly passes judgement. Anna and Tom’s story is short, running for only 113 pages, but the expat bubble they inhabit is so small, so vacuous and claustrophobic that, by the end, you’re grateful that the sharpness of Latronico’s writing allows such brevity.
Patrick Christie
Eimear McBride, The City Changes Its Face (Faber)
To write a novel about a dysfunctional relationship might not appear revolutionary. There are currently plenty of novels which mic-drop insights about the modern phenomenon of perfunctory sex. Yet this is why Eimear McBride’s firth novel stands out: not because it is not about a relationship, but because it actually is. That is to say, the couple at the centre of The City Changes Its Face aren’t stand-ins for other kinds of alienation, not metaphors for modernity, but the thing itself.
It is Camden in the mid-1990s. Whilst at drama school, an eighteen-year-old Eily meets and falls in love with Stephen, 20 years older than her and himself an established actor. The initial period of their relationship was the centre of McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2016). The City Changes Its Face returns to Eily and Stephen a year later, living together and unable to contend with an unspecified trauma. It spans a single night, punctuated by flashbacks which slowly bring the reader up to the present.
As ever, McBride’s language at first appears fragmentary, experimental — she has often been compared to Joyce, to her irritation — but her alertness to the associative potentials of sound creates effects which feel natural to thought. A shock is ‘lung-whelmingly so’; the recent past is ‘lately’s derailments.’ Like McBride’s other novels, The City Changes Its Face makes sex integral to its structure, and does not skirt the specifics of what is done in the bedroom. But Eily’s thoughts on the subject come across differently to McBride’s other protagonists. She is learning Shakespearian monologues by heart, and you feel this influence as she wanders into language which seems arcane for a teenager. Foreplay, she thinks, is ‘the sport of archness or wait.’ When Eily and Stephen stop having sex, they have ‘made dark wallows of once hallowed designs.’ These unconscious rhymes and adornments suggest not only how someone learning to act might think, but speaks also to that necessary self-seriousness with which a young person begins to first conceive of their own desires.
It is in this way — non-judgmentally, without sentimentality — that McBride looks at the misdirection of many types of desire. The City Changes Its Face is a book about a difficult relationship, yes, but in speaking from inside a specific cultural moment, asks questions which run through every life.
Rosa Appignanesi
Jia Pingwa, trans. James Trapp, Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne, Old Kiln (Sinoist Books)
Jia Pingwa was born in 1952 and was a teenager when the Cultural Revolution ramified through Chinese society, upending its social order and targeting the artistic and intellectual classes who were subjected to prison, death, humiliation and ostracisation. There have been several excellent novels about it, including by Yan Lianke (Hard Like Water, translated by Carlos Rojas) and Zhang Xianliang (Half of Man is Woman, translated by Martha Avery). Artist Ai Weiwei has also written movingly in his memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, about how it affected his father, the poet, Ai Qing.
Set in Jia’s native Shaanxi Province, Old Kiln plays to his strengths in depicting everyday lives in a rural backwater. The villagers have become infantilised by the regime and made weary by successive waves of ideology-driven bullying; while they are crude, direct and uneducated, they are also witty, wily and resilient.
This a slow-paced novel, necessarily so. The focus is on precision writing about the characters’ daily experiences, no matter how routine – there is a lot of toilet humour here, for example. This becomes a sort of pointillism where the wider political power of the novel emerges from the details, rather than being overlaid through the author’s own didacticism. It is a credit to the three translators – James Trapp, Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne – that such a substantial novel, where tone and humour are essential to its effects, feels so coherent and unified.
For the contemporary Western reader, there is – depressingly – an abundance of parallels to recognise in the wilful stupidity and evil that has also come to dominate our current moment. Old Kiln is one of those rare novels where the gifts and experiences of a generational talent collide with a major moment in history. This novel should be enough for Jia Pingwa to break through to wider international recognition; however, Chinese literature continues to be under-read, under-reviewed and under-appreciated. Let’s change that.
Rónán Hession
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape)
Pynchon’s new novel, set in Milwaukee in the early 1930s, follows in-over-his-head private investigator Hicks McTaggart on what may be a wild goose chase as he reluctantly tracks down local ‘cheese heiress’ Daphne Airmont. Her father, Bruno Airmont, the ‘Al Capone of Cheese,’ has flown the coop with the fortunes of lesser dairy magnates and mafiosos, while Daphne, affianced to a local dandy, has ‘gone hepcat,’ running off with a klezmer clarinetist. McTaggart’s ticket eventually takes him to Eastern Europe, as characters converge in a climactic trans-Transylvanian motorcycle race invaded by antisemitic descendants of Vlad the Impaler. It’s a long way from Wisconsin — though, as readers are reminded, the respected Harley-Davidsons are made in Milwaukee.
While it might not rival his earlier masterpieces in the esteem of Pynchon’s established fanbase, Shadow Ticket could serve as a great introduction to the author for new readers. Its style is recognisably Pynchonesque — zany, paranoiac, ‘bloviational’ — and, at just under 300 pages, it’s potentially more accessible than doorstoppers like Gravity’s Rainbow or Mason & Dixon. We still get characters with wacky names (‘Alf Quarrender,’ ‘Hop Wingdale’); pop songs with cheesy lyrics (‘Sir-loin steaks-from-the-bar- / -be-cue— / Hot fudge sundaes ’n’ lob-sters too’); cartoonish antics (a ticking time bomb wrapped like a Christmas gift); and a hint of the supernatural (objects ‘apporting’ from thin air, Babe Ruth calling his shot).
But most appealing here is Pynchon’s gleeful presentation of periodised vocabulary and historical shenanigans. The novel is practically an immersive 1930s experience, bringing together stumblebums and lindy hoppers, used-autogyro salesmen and virtuoso theremin players, freshwater U-boat passengers and skimpy Skee-Ball devotees. Especially compelling is a bravura passage explaining how the sudden conglomeration of entities like Kraft and Unilever destroyed Milwaukee’s dairy dominance — ‘a major sector of Wisconsin decheesed in the blink of an eye’!
John Hay
Sean Ashton, Massive Massive Oil Slick (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE)
Suppose you open a novel called Massive Massive Oil Slick. Expect the narrator to invite you to play a game with clever rules and unpredictable combinations. Avoid reading too much or too little into these, or indeed any other, rules and combinations. Suppose you play the game on the narrator’s terms, not quite knowing why? Expect it to pay off. Expect to find it hard to quit. Expect more and more from each next sentence, most of them beginning with ‘suppose’, ‘expect’ or ‘avoid’.
Suppose you join the narrator in an unidentified seminar room, where a moment ago, they were talking about things that concern you directly: ‘We were talking about death and we were talking about delays, tailbacks, slow-moving traffic. We were talking about violence, we were talking about apricots, we were talking about being in vogue. We were talking about love — being in love — and we were talking about being in debt. We were also talking about anger. We were also talking about joy: joy interspersed with anger, anger interspersed with joy.’
Expect scenarios to be brought up, considered, weighed and found wanting, discarded in favour of others, brought back, further discussed and made variously possible. Avoid trying to guess the narrator’s next move and instead follow the flow of the narration. Expect the grammar to grow on you, so much so that you lose any interest in alternative sentence structures. Avoid choosing between the scenarios you are offered in these pages, for they are all being realised at once, always with your participation. Suppose you are willing to be the protagonist in a plot where you can progress along your own story arc? Expect every move to bring you closer to a point where thought, feeling and language miraculously converge.
Anna Aslanyan
Oscar Mardell, Delirious New Lynn; or, Portage and Euphoria; or, The Carryover (5ever Books)
Delirious New Lynn; or, Portage and Euphoria; or, The Carryover appears at first sight to be published anonymously, although dig deep and you'll discover not only the author's name (Oscar Mardell) but also his email address.
Crowd-funded and published by a New Zealand indie press, the book defies summary but is described on the cover as ‘the record of an obsession with an unnavigable backwater’, being an almost comprehensive listing of all the buildings and infrastructure making up the unremarkable Auckland suburb of New Lynn, as well as a history of the district, notable local residents, businesses, past industries, places to eat, bars, gyms, public artworks and monuments. At the same time the author offers a digressive and highly subjective commentary that is in tension with the facts, subverting and enriching the text with his ambivalent feelings about the place. The second part consists of around 300 dark, smudgy monochrome photographs: very Sebaldian, numbered and captioned for easy reference to all the locations cited earlier.
Imagine a cross between a Pevsner guide, Ian Nairn at his most bilious, Herman Melville and (particularly) Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, (Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien). Mardell himself (I assume) is responsible for the ferociously disparaging and very funny reviews that preface this wildly original, very unusual documentary fiction, one in which Mardell does for New Lynn what an earlier writer did for the city of Dublin.
David Collard
Katie Kitamura, Audition (Vintage)
The best thing about Audition is that it doesn’t make sense. It’s about an actress who’s living in New York with her husband when she is approached by a young man who believes he is her son. She has never had children. It’s a fascinating premise, the impossibility of which is addressed many times but never tackled head-on and dismissed as it should be.
After meeting him at a restaurant in the opening scene, the actress (the narrator) encounters him again near the theatre where rehearsals have begun for her new play. Shortly afterwards she learns that he has been hired as the director’s assistant. She can’t get rid of him, nor his strangely intimate allegation that he belongs in her life.
Audition doesn’t buckle to this illogical son until the second half, when the narrator seems to surrender entirely to the role she had refused. It is almost as if the first half had never happened, the son now living with the narrator and her husband in their apartment, the same apartment as before: clean, well-lit, clearly expensive (Kitamura’s characters always find themselves in polished domestic spaces, more like showrooms than homes, so stark and functional they hardly seem inhabited.)
Intimacies, Kitamura’s previous novel, about an interpreter representing a war criminal at The Hague, was similarly succinct and severe, similarly preoccupied with understanding the inexplicable, with the treatment of events as evidence. Her language is always precise, observational, a little stiff but in an elegant, endearingly fragile way, by turns assertive and confessional: ‘This is how it was’; ‘I wondered if I had made a mistake.’ One way of describing it would be to say it is the language of someone in shock, someone who senses the significance but not yet the meaning of the events they relay.
Reading Audition, going from the first part into the second, is a disorienting experience. I felt left behind. Up to that point the novel had presented a situation that didn’t make sense, in a manner that did; the narrator shared the reader’s incredulity. But in the second part I felt weirdly abandoned, that the relationships I had previously understood were unstable, shifting beneath my feet, just as they were for the narrator. What better way to consider how we are all characters in each others lives, slipping in and out of roles, meeting and betraying expectation, familiarity competing with estrangement?
Magnus Rena
Alex Pheby, Waterblack (Galley Beggar Press)
Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft series concluded this year with the spectacular Waterblack, again featuring beautiful cover art by James Nunn. The trilogy, which begins with Mordew and continues in Malarkoi, follows the story of slum boy Nathan Treeves and the forces trying to shape his destiny in a world of Dickensian poverty, precarious wealth and narcissistic magicians whose campaign to kill God has left the world at their mercy. If this feels like conventional fantasy territory, Pheby’s approach is anything but. His skill lies in playfully upending convention and transforming fantasy keystones, from messiah children to complicated magic systems, into a compelling exploration of the nature of power and what it costs to wield.
Waterblack brings Cities of the Weft to a satisfying close despite spending most of its time away from Nathan. Instead we follow the assassin Sharli and a pair of magical dogs, all of whom supposedly died in Malarkoi. Pheby has no time for fetishising spoilers. Readers are informed of many characters’ fates in copious paratextual material which should not be passed over. These are confident, demanding novels, Waterblack most of all, which wryly admonish readers for such habits developed elsewhere. A hilarious example of this comes in Waterblack’s opening dramatis personae. In the entry on a new character, Ganax, ‘one of the priesthood of the Dumnonii’, who was ‘happy to turn ash into a ten-summer child’, Pheby notes that ‘if you do not know what this means, you need only read on. Providing you are not one of those inadequate readers whose eyes skip across the page in search of “what happens next” you will learn the meaning of the phrases above, and how they are used in context’.
Behind this gleefully hectoring tone is Pheby’s simple request: trust him. Trust that what he has in store will unfurl at its own pace, that each word is purposeful and worthy of attention. This is the best new fantasy I have read in a long time, with a wit and style so often missing from the genre.
WJ Davies
David Szalay, Flesh (Jonathan Cape)
As someone who writes about books, I have found it somewhat frustrating whenever I’m talking with friends and I try to describe the appeal of David Szalay’s Flesh. The novel, which recently won the 2025 Booker Prize, begins in the 1980s with 15-year-old István, a tall, handsome, lonely, remarkably passive, not particularly garrulous teenager, living with his single mother in a dreary apartment block somewhere in Hungary. The novel, like Istvan’s poor life, is propelled by a series of events — some good, some bad, most maybe better characterised simply as lucky — that cleave him away from the quiet, undramatic life he seemed on course for, casting him adrift in a world so unimaginably different from the one in which he’d grown up.
I’ve read some fine critics try to do justice to the book in their reviews, and I was particularly interested to read that they had made of the book’s lack of interiority — its complete unwillingness to allow us into the mind of its protagonist — but none I read captured just how beguiling the experience of reading Flesh is. I read it over the course of three days and I suspect if I’d had the time I would have read it in a single sitting. Over the holidays, if time permits, I highly recommend clearing off an afternoon and trying to do the same. My thoughts about the novel are probably best summed up by the words of Roddy Doyle, the chair of this year’s Booker Prize panel. ‘We had never read anything quite like it.’
Tadhg Hoey
Nicola Barker, TonyInterruptor (Granta)
Nicola Barker is the rambunctious chipmunk of the English novel — burrowing, hoarding, joyfully rollicking, lodging herself in her own unique downspout. TonyInterruptor, her first novel since 2019, illustrates her crackpot genius. It kicks off, as things often do, at ‘an improvisational jazz show in a moderately affluent southern English cathedral town’. Sasha Keyes — uncompromising, pompous — is in the throes of a trumpet solo when a heckler brings the show to a standstill. ‘Is this honest?’ asks the man. ‘Are we all being honest here?’ (This being Nicola Barker, italics are never far. Nor are parentheses.) The First Interruption, as it becomes known, is a near-mythic event and viral sensation, ‘the subject of four books – this being the third – and the root of approximately 2.5 million tweets and countless memes’.
It has repercussions on a rhapsody of characters: Sasha Keyes, who has a crisis Zoom with his ex-Goth ‘lady-manager’, Janice; India Shore, a precocious Zoomer who films the viral video on her iPhone; Lambert, her architecture professor father who dragged her along; Mallory, Lambert’s ebullient wife, a trained barrister and relentless questioner; Fi Kinebuchi, Sasha’s autoharp player and ex-wife, whose fabulous frizz Barker likens to an Alaskan Klee Klai; and #TonyInterruptor himself, John Lincoln Braithwaite, a lover of libraries, smoking and the sensual properties of light. Barker is our gleeful guide through these intersections, livening things with asides, riffs, connections, motifs.
The effect is that of a conversation with a garrulous, breathless raconteur, or — yes — an improvisational jazz performance, with none of Sasha’s strained grandiosity. Historically, Barker has alternated between hawks and sparrows: a big behemoth (Behindlings, Darkmans) is followed by a shorter work of comic sprezzatura (Clear, The Burley Cross Postbox Theft). In recent years, this pattern has held less: at 224 pages, TonyInterruptor is the same length as her previous novel, I Am Sovereign, a delightful operetta set during a twenty-minute house viewing in Llandudno. But short does not equal minor. TonyInterruptor is an extraordinarily free novel and, in its freedom, capacious: what begins as a local heckle becomes an affecting exploration of transcendence, regeneration and the unpredictability of love.
Daniel Marc Janes
Imogen Cassels, Silk Work (Prototype)
Imogen Cassels’ debut collection Silk Work opens with a dance among pronouns: ‘I woke up like Nijinsky. You do. We’ve all / been there, it happens to the best of us’. In this poem as in the book as a whole, ‘There is nothing immutable / about anyone’. Just as speakers and subjects appear only in their evasions, their constant nervous flight from subjecthood, so too does Cassels’ lyric gift make itself most felt in a desire to resist the lyrical. Not the flowers and nightingales of old, but ‘this wrong / blossom’ and songbirds as ‘an irrelevant pain’. Often it’s only right at the end of poems that something gives, that a tense erudite attentiveness opens out into the barest promise of something beyond it: ‘my thin heart glaring towards / a serac, over the upper edge of chance’.
In one of my favourite poems in the book, ‘Clerkenwell’, the urban mundane (‘all the people were out’) is caught on the wing, ‘A trick / of the what’. I can’t quite account for the power of the poem’s last lines, which to me feel the thrill of ordinary unpleasantness, all the gross freedoms of a summer in town: ‘towards remnants of forest reserves / what once had been a bird / the hot weather coming’. The book is full of sharp hard phrases (I love ‘full bitter marmalade’), wry are-you-for-real epigrams (‘as with any other good disaster / it is languorous or sanguine’), and glimpses of seeming meta-commentary (‘That rhythm again / at the edge of thought’); tropes and turns of language which register the influence of a particular British avant-garde tradition. (What might in some places be called the Cambridge School.) But for all its pushing at the edges, the seams of words and sounds, there’s nothing just contrarian or tendentious here. These are investigations.
Ben Philipps
Sally Carson, Crooked Cross (Persephone Books)
The reissue of Sally Carson's Crooked Cross was a momentous event. First published in 1934, it charts the experiences of one German family in the fictional Bavarian town of Kranach, from the Christmas Eve of 1933 to the following year's midsummer. Carson had lived in Munich and writes from first hand of the febrile political atmosphere in which Hitler became Chancellor, and the Nazi state was birthed.
As nationalist fanaticism possesses the brothers Helmy and Erich in contrasting ways, their sister Lexa, whose fiancé Moritz is an assimilated Jewish doctor, is driven into an agonised dead end. While Lexa struggles to find the courage to resist the tide of delusion, Erich is delighted to discover a public pretext for his latent brutality, enjoying not just the street violence, but the moral recoil it awakens in his sister.
We might have thought there was nothing more to be said about twentieth-century fascism, just as its contemporary successor is staging a re-entry into democratic politics everywhere, but Carson's narrative is astonishing for its nervous prescience. It is frequently hard to remind oneself that her insights into the lethal duality of far-right extremism, its alloy of twinkling sentiment and Bacchanalian sadism, were arrived at not in the aftermath of the disaster, but when it had only just started smashing shop windows.
Stuart Walton