Lots of people have been e-mailing me for advice about surviving a recession. Indeed, it’s an interesting question. I have often said how lucky people are to be well-off and in a world with rising expectations. What’s my message for a world of falling expectations? Read more ›

A memoir by novelist A M Homes, a documentary on coroner Shiya Ribowsky and the disinterment of anglo-Catholic Cardinal Newman have combined to make me ponder the business of our connection with the remains of the dead. What’s odd is that modern technology seems to make us more medieval than ever. Read more ›

How delicious that Damien Hirst has cleaned up even as the media tell us that it’s all up for over-weaning capitalist thugs – his customers. What’s truly miraculous is that the art magnate and entrepreneur manages to come across as cheerfully demotic and populist as he rakes in the lucre. What we sense, of course, is that Hirst’s work is an essay in shock-value. He plays games with what offends us and the value we will place on things. Skulls and diamonds, and stuffed calves and gold leaf, are the ideal art objects for a period of capitalist hiatus. These bad times are perfect times for Hirst’s art and its value. Read more ›

Evan Davis, BBC Radio 4′s new hip voice of reason, has been introducing slugs of writing about money crises for BBC Radio 4′s latest book – in this case, “books” – of the week. There is a mistake (a category error) lurking in his efforts. The show confuses different sorts of crisis in quite an important way. Read more ›

Robert Harris’ thriller The Ghost is a brilliant lark. It succeeds because you could enjoy it without knowing much about Tony Blair, Cherie Blair, Anji Hunter and all the other people who have been described as the reality on which Harris has spun a fictional web. But there are some quite big gaps in Harris’s satire. Read more ›

Actually, as a celibate male, I don’t like Nazi sex. Or perhaps I should say: I’ve never had it so I wouldn’t know. But I do think it’s important to defend people’s sexual fantasies. I’ll go further. I think right-minded people need to stand by people who like Nazi sex. One should stand with them in their liking it. Read more ›

This would be a great novel if all it did was add to the heap of comic writing about Jewishness. But Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan scores many times over by taking us – breathless, gob-smacked – from the nouveau-riche world of glamorous, dodgy Moscow and on out to the staggeringly vibrant, but staggering, world of the ex-Soviet republics. Read more ›