More from Books

Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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?

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity

A Caribbean mystery

18 February 2023 9:00 am

When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous

Doctor in despair

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

18 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

11 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

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

4 February 2023 9:00 am

When Florence Nightingale was joined in Scutari by groups of volunteer nuns, tensions among them soon imperilled the entire female nursing experiment