Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’
‘Why do we do what we do to each other?’ he asks, citing among many atrocities the dropping of the atom bomb and the genocide of aboriginal Tasmanians
The magic and mystery of Georgia: Hard by a Great Forest, by Leo Vardiashvili, reviewed
Homesick after 20 years in London, Irakli returns to his Caucasian roots and promptly disappears. Can Saba, his youngest son, track him down against the odds?
A strong whiff of goodbyes: The Pole and Other Stories, by J.M. Coetzee, reviewed
‘The cogs are seizing up, the lights are going out.’ As Elizabeth Costello clears her desk in this collection of stories, we feel that Coetzee may be doing the same
Falklanders won’t forgive the EU’s ‘Las Malvina’ blunder
This week, the European Union, in its infinite wisdom, made pretty much the only blunder which, in the eyes of Falkland Islanders, there…
Proof at last that the Great Pyramid wasn’t built by aliens
Because I once made the mistake of dabbling in Egyptology, some ‘friend’ will schwack me every other week with a…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
A pawn in the Great Game: the sad story of Charles Masson
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…
The scholars who solved the riddles in the sands
In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…
How to scale a mountain without leaving home
How to scale a mountain without leaving home
Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is certainly no Abyssinian Andy McNab
In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for…
The great American trauma in minute detail
Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost?…
The end of the world is nigh: the latest short stories reviewed
Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an…
The B-side of The English Patient? Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, reviewed
In 1945, on a Putney side street, in a city full of darkness and half in rubble from the Blitz,…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
A master of Norwegian wood
Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a…
