Namely: now that everyone builds reliable cars efficiently, Westerners are increasingly buying cars for emotional reasons, rather as they buy clothes. Now that cars, like clothes, fulfil all basic requirements, so colour, style, labels and image matter more and more. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the Europeans have always been better at serving up emotion.European cars [...]

The VIN is a unique sequence of 17 digits stamped on to a plate which is riveted to the car body and also stamped directly on to the metalwork. This is when it gets a little more tricky, and in some cases the criminals perform more serious surgery known as “cut and shut”. Here the [...]

So if I write a scene with soldiers, and I don’t seem to come down on anyone’s side, they worry.”The incident again illustrates the internecine complexities of Irishness which the play explores. And while Devlin has written non-Irish works (she adapted the famously slated Juliette Binoche / Ralph Fiennes Wuthering Heights, and D H Lawrence’s [...]

The biting cold is wonderful, as is the clean air, the isolation and the smell of wood fires wafting through deserted pine forests. Walking is also a pleasure, and nature trails are clearly marked. Deep in the woods I came across an Anglican church, tin- roofed and tiny.The Troodos Hotel – Swiss chalet meets British [...]

In a cane field her mother had been raped by a Tonton Macoute. At school, Haitians are taunted with having HBO – Haitian Body Odour – and are accused of carrying Aids because only the “Four Hs” catch the virus – heroin addicts, haemophiliacs, homosexuals, and Haitians. For six years Sophie studies hard while her [...]

Douglas Woolf’s The Timing Chain, with its delicate and ironic account of an author’s visit to his publisher, makes Amis’s version look leaden-footed.The writer who stands in the way of Amis’s claim to be the laureate of Notting Hill is the protean Falstaff of late-century English literature: Michael Moorcock. There’s nothing more that needs to [...]