Lead book review
Paris is perhaps the greatest character in Balzac’s Human Comedy
The drama of the street is a constant theme, though Balzac himself took most pleasure in the city’s ‘gloomy passages and silent cul-de-sacs between midnight and two in the morning’
A long goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood’s experiences as a young man in Weimar Germany would be reworked in his autofiction for the rest of his life
Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines
Violet Moller focuses on three 16th-century‘heroes of science’, John Dee, Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and their great libraries and observatories
The wry humour of Franz Kafka
A masterly new translation of his Diaries reminds us that Kafka wasn’t solely the prophet of a century of dehumanisation
The joy of hanging out with artists
Lynn Barber finds painters and sculptors easily the most congenial people to interview - despite having received a death threat from the Chapman brothers
‘There are an awful lot of my paintings I don’t like,’ admitted Francis Bacon
While waspishly dismissive of many of the 20th century’s greatest artists, Bacon was also critical of his own work, in conversation with David Sylvester
The Berkeley scandal of 1681 transfixed London society – and Aphra Behn soon capitalised on it
In The Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister, often called the ‘first English novel’, Behn successfully milked the affair for all it was worth
The identical twins who captivated literary London
Intelligent and beautiful, Celia and Mamaine Paget were loved by some of the greatest writers of the interwar years, but remained uniquely devoted to each other
To Salman Rushdie, a dream before his attempted murder ‘felt like a premonition’
Though premonitions are not things he believes in, Rushdie notes the many spooky coincidences surrounding the attack – which he describes in gripping, terrifying detail
We must never lose the treasured Orkneys
Fertile fields and spectacular sea stacks are matched by an extraordinarily rich, dramatic history. No wonder the islands have been so celebrated for centuries
In the grip of apocalypse angst
Dorian Lynskey lays out the many ways in which we have imagined the world ending – through pandemic, nuclear holocaust, climate change, asteroid impact or, most unnervingly, AI
How country living changed the lives of three remarkable women writers
Harriet Baker describes how Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann found new forms of peace and creativity away from the stifling capital
‘Enough to kill any man’: the trials of serving Queen Victoria
Of all the Queen’s prime ministers, Gladstone suffered the most from her wilfulness, but while he opposed her policies he did much to popularise her monarchy
The tyranny of 1970s self-help gurus
Clients pursuing ’true self’ were expected to wear identical clothes, shave their heads, self-flagellate and be ‘given hell’, while paying through the nose for it
Before the Blitz: the dynamism of British architecture
Many competing styles flourished in the interwar years, including functionalism, art deco, neoclassicism, seaside moderne, mock-Mayan and Egyptian revivalism
Four months adrift in the Pacific: a couple’s extraordinary feat of endurance
When a freak occurrence wrecked the Baileys’ sloop 300 miles from the Galapagos, their chances of rescue were minimal – and one of them couldn’t even swim
Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them
Andrew Stauffer traces the poet’s tumultuous life through some of the most remarkable missives in the English language
The greed and hypocrisy of the opium trade continue to shock
Amitav Ghosh admits he found writing his history difficult because of the obscene profiteering and suffering he had to cover
A wealth of knowledge salvaged from shipwrecks
Goods found on board can illuminate trade routes and global connections, often going back thousands of years, in ways no other archaeological sites can
The problem with westerners seeking oriental enlightenment
Those chasing after blissful satori never seem interested in the people who actually live in Asia. They want to float in higher spheres
Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?
Covid-19 proved devastating to our self-confidence and faith in others, says Daniel Freeman, who describes the ‘corrosive’ effects of mistrust on individuals and society
The travails of Britain’s first Labour government
Attacked in the press, by the right and even by its own supporters, Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived government still managed to achieve a surprising amount
The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower
Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin describe the courage of the youthful protest leaders in Hong Kong who sacrificed so much for the cause of democracy
What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?
Philip Hensher 25 May 2024 9:00 am
Geoffrey Wheatcroft identifies two root causes: the disastrous revision of the leadership election procedure, and David Cameron’s turn to the referendum as a device to govern