More from Books

They felt they could achieve anything together: two brave women in war-torn Serbia

20 April 2024 9:00 am

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

20 April 2024 9:00 am

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

Grotesque vignettes: The Body in the Mobile Library and Other Stories, by Peter Bradshaw, reviewed

20 April 2024 9:00 am

Relishing the outrageous and improbable, Bradshaw treats us to stories that often rely more on twist than plot

Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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?

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

13 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

6 April 2024 9:00 am

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

My prep school scarred me for life

6 April 2024 9:00 am

‘A part of me died at school’, Charles Spencer writes in his shockingly stark account of sadism and sexual abuse at Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire, in the 1970s

Stories of the Sussex Downs

30 March 2024 9:00 am

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

30 March 2024 9:00 am

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

30 March 2024 9:00 am

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

30 March 2024 9:00 am

The celebrated photojournalist describes his peripatetic youth recording revolution in Haiti, hunger and homelessness in Mexico and the civil rights movement in the US

Caught in a Venus flytrap: Red Pyramid, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Sorokin’s satirical stories are not for the fainthearted, but there are few more dedicated critics of Russia's infinite bureaucracy writing fiction today