Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher

Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, Philip Hensher was among Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. The author of six novels, a collection of short stories and an opera libretto, he has won numerous prizes including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Stonewall Journalist of the Year. His 2008 novel, The Northern Clemency, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Prize. A regular presence in the British media, alongside his Wednesday column for The Independent, he writes for The Spectator and Mail on Sunday. His new novel, King Of The Badgers, will be published by Fourth Estate in March 2011.

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Philip Hensher: Deep in the enchanted forest, a very English sensibility has stirred

Forests are places of dapplement, of light and shade. At the back of everything is Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, turning the social hierarchy upside down

Recently by Philip Hensher

Philip Hensher: Why stay at home for the best education?

Saturday, 12 February 2011

Are we, in general, stick-in-the-muds? Do students hate abroad, or something?

Philip Hensher: Bohemia has fallen to the bankers

Saturday, 5 February 2011

The steady flow of young people into Berlin has become a torrent. The city’s purpose is vanishing

Philip Hensher: All alone, even when we're together

Saturday, 29 January 2011

The curious thing is that these devices, which isolate users so effectively from the world around them, are often propagated as a means of social connection

Philip Hensher: Are the British just too phlegmatic?

Saturday, 15 January 2011

When a train in India was 23 minutes late, it caused violent protest. But if we in Britain reacted like that to failures of service, where would you stop?

Philip Hensher: All of us knew Pooky Quesnel would be famous eventually

Tuesday, 28 December 2010

The student population produced conspicuous figures – famous within the university, and whose future world domination everyone took for granted

Philip Hensher: Every bubble has to burst eventually

Thursday, 23 December 2010

The market in all sorts of things is moving eastwards, but few so fascinatingly as the market in vintage wines. Figures released this week by Sotheby's show that the bulk of its wine sales at auction now takes place in Hong Kong – some $52.6m, compared to just short of $21m in London. Some of the individual figures are astonishing; a single standard-sized bottle of Château Lafite from 1869 sold in October for $232,692. The values of some wines, such as Lafite-Rothschild, have gone up by 1,000 per cent in the last 10 years.

It was only with Dickens that his more impressionable readers started suggesting it was time we tell each other how much we mean to each other

Philip Hensher: Christmas puts us all on a stage. Is that why we've come to dread it?

Saturday, 18 December 2010

Somewhere in one of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, a character makes the cardinal error of alluding, casually, to Christmas in the middle of November. "Oh, don't," her friend responds with, Taylor says, "all the English dread Christmas".

Philip Hensher: Stop worrying – the kids will be all right

Saturday, 11 December 2010

If they aren’t allowed to play British Bulldog unsupervised at seven, then they’re going to decide to throw a fire extinguisher off a building at 18

Philip Hensher: 'Thatcherite' – an insult that's had its day

Saturday, 4 December 2010

To accuse a front bench of being ‘Thatcher’s children’, when they nearly all unashamedly regard her asapost-war giant, seems peculiarly fatuous

Philip Hensher: Can you say good morning in Bengali?

Saturday, 27 November 2010

Even if we learn Mandarin to negotiate over bulk prices for widgets rather than read the poetry of Li Po, the humanising influence will make itself known

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Philip Hensher: A very English sensibility has stirred

A political question has run up against the buffers of the national psyche.


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