A passion for moths – and the thrill of the chase
Katty Baird braves the cliffs and wind-blasted moors of East Lothian to identify as many species of these maligned insects as possible
How chilling ghost stories became a Christmas tradition
A chilling Victorian tradition
There is nothing cosy about Penelope Lively
At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters…
Working remotely: five formidable female anthropologists
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
The sex life of the Monarch butterfly is positively wild
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On…
The subversive, Austenesque wit of ‘Late in the Day’, by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’…
100 Best Novels in Translation is a surprisingly sumptious read
Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign…
The Friendly Ones: a novel about prejudice of all kinds:
Readers should skim past the blurb of The Friendly Ones. The novel is about prejudice, of many different kinds; but…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
A Girl in Exile: Ismail Kadare’s novel is full of absence
My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts…
The tortured genius of Shostakovich
When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of…
For William Boyd's war-photographer heroine, life is a series of accidents
Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory…
An epic journey (in Hobson-Jobsonese) through the first Opium War to the British seizure of Hong Kong
T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s…
Lurid & Cute is too true to its title
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…
Which great French novelist was also a crossword-setter?
One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration…
An escape from New South Wales
Thomas Keneally has constructed his latest novel around a framework of true events: the mass break-out of Japanese PoWs from…
The Roth of tenderness and of rage
In the autumn of 2012, Philip Roth told a French magazine that his latest book, Nemesis, would be his last.…
Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell - review
There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists…
