Wykeham's Book Club

This week we review Women by Mihail Sebastian.  First published in 1933, this is a seductive, heady and at times unsettling novella. It explores the relationships that its central character, Stefan, conducts with the women he meets throughout his life.  Stefan begins the novella as a young medical student, lauded wistfully by one female character as, “un noveau jeune homme.” The four words contain an apt splicing of the traits which make him so alluring. His youth both betrays innocence and disguises an innate sexuality; he might be just a young man, or the object of rampant desire. He is something...

Book Club, 17th April: This week’s book is ‘Intimations,’ by Zadie Smith. The subtitle, ‘Six Essays,’ does not gird you for the emotional generosity of the collection. Nor does the stature of the volume which is, as Smith puts it, "Small by definition, short by necessity." The essays were written in the early months of the pandemic and reflect on the peculiarly unclassifiable experience of lockdown. They are, though, as relevant now in their capacious littleness as ever. The essays form meditations on different tranches of the ‘every day’, whatever our idea of the ‘every day’ might become in times...