More from Books
Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises
The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed
The triumphs and disasters of 1845
It was a year packed with drama – from the transatlantic crossing of the SS Great Britain to the start of the Irish potato blight that would leave millions starving
Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs
The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away
Man of many parts
The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces
What’s to become of Wales?
Exploring stretches of the country’s Roman road, Tom Bullough notes how climate change and environmental degradation are seriously threatening the landscape
The indomitable Pamela Anderson sees the best in everything
Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity
A Caribbean mystery
When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous
Doctor in despair
A surgeon from Kashmir is tormented by the penal operations he once performed under Sharia law, such as amputations for robbery
Failing to denigrate Britain’s entire colonial record has become a heinous crime
Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows
The death of popular music in Cambodia
The vast majority of musicians who adopted 1960s rock and roll were later reviled by the Khmer Rouge and consigned to the Killing Fields, says Dee Payok
Travelling hopefully
Sam Miller challenges the ‘myth of sedentarism’, arguing that mankind is naturally nomadic and that an itinerant life is anyway good for us
Three Dublin families
Characters ruminate, doors are shut and relationships falter as one person’s thoughts grate on another’s in these subtle, tightly-knit stories
Frank and fearless
Leaving poetry aside, his memoir covers insanity, debt, drugs, narcissism, religious mania and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored
Where the wild things are
The Mesta region of Bulgaria, where the river meets the forests of the western Rhodope range, remains remarkably intact and rich in wild harvests
The long and the short of it
There are many vagaries about measurements, says Claire Cock-Starkey: the length of the foot has often changed, but British shoe sizes hark back to the reign of Edward II
Expelled from paradise
A mixed-race family living in an island paradise off the coast of Maine are made painfully aware that their days are numbered
Make an early start
Shinichi Suzuki certainly believed that learning music is like learning a language, and to be ‘fluent’ in an instrument merely depends on starting early enough
The mock king of Madagascar
David Graeber imagines the 17th-century buccaneer establishing an enlightened kingdom in the Indian Ocean where all goods were held in common
Loved and lost
The third act of Morrison’s family saga focuses on Gill, the once loving and generous sister he was so close to but was unable to save
Cosmo Landesman has no time for feel-good-grief memoirs
The heartbroken father endlessly relives his son’s suicide, raking over every moment of Jack’s battle with depression and drug addiction
The vexing problem of ancient Greek mathematics
Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes viewed mathematics in a very different way to us, but Reviel Netz helps us glimpse the minds of antiquity’s great thinkers
Cold-blooded murder in Amazonia
Criminal syndicates, corrupt officials and faceless assassins now control the increasingly depleted rainforest, killing or enslaving all who stand in their way
The stone boats of Celtic saints inspire a bizarre pilgrimage
In homage to St Magnus, the stonemason Beatrice Searle carries a heavy load from Orkney to Trondheim, following an ancient pilgrims’ way
The lost world of Jewish Rhodes
Stella Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, recalls the vibrant, long-established Jewish community that existed in the Dodecanese before the Nazi deportations in 1944
Nursing grievances in the Crimean War
When Florence Nightingale was joined in Scutari by groups of volunteer nuns, tensions among them soon imperilled the entire female nursing experiment