Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a

What would happen if a foursome of nonconformist, arty college kids started a band, made music that sounded like nothing on the radio, ground it out on the road in club after grimy club, sat for interviews on radio station after college radio station, remained committed to their musical vision but outworked every other indie

By the time the novelist David Lodge died on January 1 at the age of 89, the obituaries had long been written, gathering dust and occasional updates in the as-needed folder on the desktops of magazine and newspaper editors. And when they were published in the days after New Year’s, they struck an amazingly similar