Ireland through the eyes of a brilliant teenage naturalist
Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother —…
Anything for a good story
When I was at boarding school in the early 1970s, the Durrells, or at least Gerald, were immensely popular. My…
Old, unhappy, far off things
August Geiger led an unremarkable life. Born in 1926, the third of ten children of a Catholic farming family in…
The don’ts of ‘parenting’
In the American way, the child psychologist Alison Gopnik’s new book has an attractive sound-bitey title dragging a flat-footed subtitle…
Love like Salt: a memoir of music, motherhood and magical thinking
Helen Stevenson’s daughter Clara has cystic fibrosis. Love Like Salt is an account of living with the disease, but it…
The boy who rebuilt the sun on earth
In 2008, when Taylor Wilson was 14, he created a working nuclear fusion reactor, ‘a miniature sun on earth’. At…
Monstrous, beautiful, damaged people make for tiresome company in Polly Samson’s The Kindness
Julian is clever, handsome and spoiled, a gilded youth who has all the girls wanting to mother him, and a…
Powers of persuasion: how Churchill brought America on side
In time for the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death comes this pacy novel about his attempts to persuade the Americans…
Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in
In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered…
Andrew Marr thinks he’s a novelist. I don’t
It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming,…
In love with the lodger
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…
The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous,…
Start with a torpedo, and see where you go from there
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
Did Hurricane Katrina have an angel of mercy — or an angel of death?
On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned…
Why Jeremy Paxman's Great War deserves a place on your bookshelf
The Great War involved the civilian population like no previous conflict. ‘Men, women and children, factory, workshop and army —…
The Son, by Philipp Meyer - review
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
