More from Books
Marks out of ten
Like a weary schoolmaster toiling over his pupils’ homework, Peter Kemp dispenses praise, encouragement or reproof to modern fiction’s big-hitters
The good stepmother
Jean entertains her young stepdaughter Leah with drawings and fairy stories – but the two grow sadly estranged in this haunting novel with its own fairy-tale similarities
The world is ablaze – yet climate chaos still takes us by surprise
Our unpreparedness was vividly illustrated by the catastrophic Canadian inferno of 2016 – originally judged a minor brushfire beyond Fort McMurray’s city limits
Black Britons betrayed
Racism in Britain may be less acute than in America or even France, but the false promises made to the Windrush generation have left a bitter aftermath
Tunnels of love
With their elegant entrances and blend of Art Nouveau, Romanticism and Modernism, the white-tiled stations of the Parisian underground are works of art in themselves
Reading, writing and arithmetic – the glorious interrelation of maths and literature
Sarah Hart discusses the Oulipo group, Jorge Luis Borges and Eleanor Catton among other writers who have explored the use of mathematics in their works
The making of a poet: Wilfred Owen’s ‘autobiography’ in letters
How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters
Bizarre miniatures
With flying narrators and women whose hair drags on the floor, there’s something of Leonora Carrington’s weird visions about Williams’s short stories
Why are the authorities so keen to stop the young having fun?
In his history of dance music in modern Britain, Ed Gillett describes police kettling at raves from the 1990s onwards and the attempt by parliament to ban repetitive beats
Violence overshadowed my Yorkshire childhood
Catherine Taylor describes her anxiety growing up in Sheffield against an ‘uneasy backdrop’ of picketing miners, the Hillsborough disaster and a serial killer on the loose
Sinister siblings
A brother and sister are dispatched to a relative’s farm in Colorado, and grow up isolated, unfeeling and even estranged from each other
Russia’s complex relationship with the ruble
The first banknotes were greeted with deep suspicion in 1769 – but it was nothing to the distrust that Soviet and post-Soviet issues aroused
Centuries of martyrs
There is no redemption in this account of the birth of Latin Christendom, with ‘heretics’ suffering cruelly for the beliefs, just as Christian martyrs had under the Romans
The perils of permissiveness
The erotic adventures of a teenager who finally meets her match became a succès de scandale in 1920, and will still raise eyebrows today
How a small town in Ukraine stopped the Russians in their tracks
Andrew Harding describes the hastily assembled ‘Dad’s Army’ – and formidable babushka – who sensationally resisted the Russian advance on Voznesensk last year
Beware of pity
In her powerful memoir-cum-manifesto, Selina Mills tells us what she misses most, what irritates her most and why she won’t have a guide dog
The power and the glory that was Belfast
Before the Troubles hijacked its reputation, the city was renowned for its linen industry and great shipyards, responsible for an eighth of the global shipbuilding trade
The Teutonic goddess who ‘created’ the Rolling Stones
Of the Stones’ talented wives and girlfriends, Anita Pallenberg contributed most, dictating the band’s style and even how they should remix tracks
‘We cannot turn back’ from the League of Nations, said Woodrow Wilson – but did just that
His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality
Nostalgia for old, rundown coastal Sussex
Despite the seediness and threat of violence, Littlehampton was a place of neighbourly camaraderie, fondly evoked in Sally Bayley’s latest memoir
Man for hire
Shoji Morimoto offers himself to strangers in Tokyo to queue on their behalf, make a fuss of their dogs or simply provide a human presence
Private obsessions
A world of private fetishes, obsessions, childhood memories and literary passions is dazzlingly revealed in 13 short stories
A celebration of the music of Jamaica
Abandoned in infancy, Alex Wheatle grew up in children’s homes, but found salvation in roots reggae – and, eventually, his father in Jamaica
Mother trouble: Commitment, by Mona Simpson, reviewed
Simpson writes from personal experience in this moving story of three children’s commitment to their mentally ill mother
Tabloid fever
A tabloid journalist desperate for a scoop pursues a young Irish mother whose daughter is rumoured to have killed a child. But is there any truth in the story?
