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…
