More from Books
They felt they could achieve anything together: two brave women in war-torn Serbia
Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, lovers and fellow suffragettes, risked their lives as nursing staff in the first world war and exposed the absurdity of Edwardian homophobia
Being a printer was what Benjamin Franklin prided himself on most
Having learnt the trade as a child in London, the polymath established a thriving printing business in Philadelphia, bringing humour and enlightenment to the American millions
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria
Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis
Adrift on the Canadian frontier: The Voyageur, by Paul Carlucci, reviewed
Based on the 19th-century ‘voyageur’ Alexis de Martin, Carlucci’s young protagonist is befriended by kindly strangers. But what are their true motives?
English civil law has become a luxury good beyond the reach of most of us
Tom Burgis makes this painfully clear in his account of the long hounding of the former MP Charlotte Leslie by the vengeful millionaire Mohamed Amersi
Are we finally beginning to understand gravity?
Claudia de Rham explores the true nature of this fundamental force as she struggles against received wisdom to get a new theory of ‘massive gravity’ recognised
Eighty years on, the planning of Operation Neptune remains awesome
The seaborne invasion went so smoothly, it might have been thought plain-sailing. But that was far from the truth. Nick Hewitt describes the meticulous forethought that preceded it
Harping on the music of our ancestors
From a series of mysterious objects – ‘flower flutes’, inscriptions, ‘little black things like beetles’ wing cases’ – Graeme Lawson conjures the haunting melodies of the past
Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance
Examples of 18th-century graffiti range from romantic rhymes scratched on windowpanes to the haunting marks of political prisoners incised on dungeon walls
London’s dark underbelly: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed
With its vast cast and twisting plot, O’Hagan’s complex novel feels as busy and noisy as the north London thoroughfare of its title
What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus
Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
The desperate desire to belong: England is Mine, by Nicolas Padamsee, reviewed
A teenage victim of bullying is gradually drawn into a world of online extremism in this entirely relatable story of the adolescent yearning for acceptance
Turf wars in Las Vegas: City in Ruins, by Don Winslow, reviewed
The concluding volume of the Danny Ryan trilogy sees the gangster hero involved in a bitter feud over the purchase of a crumbling property on the Las Vegas Strip
‘Now I have been made whole’: Lucy Sante’s experience of transition
Until the age of 66, Sante lived as a deeply divided man. In this story of self-realisation, she describes how transitioning finally ‘lifted the veil’ over her existence
The secret of success in Formula 1
For decades, competitive advantage depended on finding loopholes in the sport’s rule book – and no one knew that better than the British entrepreneur Bernie Ecclestone
The rat as hero
After adopting two baby rats as pets, Joe Shute slowly overcomes his aversion and learns to appreciate the intelligence of creatures that are really quite like us
Stories of the Sussex Downs
Focusing on a 20-mile square of West Sussex, Alexandra Harris explores its rich history, from the wreck of a Viking longboat to a refuge for French Resistance agents
The horrors of the Eastern Front
Nick Lloyd reinforces Churchill’s sentiment that the first world war in the East was ‘one of the most frightful misfortunes to befall mankind’
Why today’s youth is so anxious and judgmental
In a well-evidenced diatribe, Jonathan Haidt accuses the creators of smartphone culture of rewiring childhood and changing human development on an unimaginable scale
On the road with Danny Lyon
The celebrated photojournalist describes his peripatetic youth recording revolution in Haiti, hunger and homelessness in Mexico and the civil rights movement in the US