More from Books
Harpo Marx – genius, idiot savant or lovable overgrown child?
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
An angry poltergeist: Long Shadows, by Abigail Cutter, reviewed
Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The…
Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?
On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…
Adrift in Berlin: Sojourn, by Amit Chaudhuri, reviewed
Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…
A shaggy drug story: Industry of Magic & Light, by David Keenan, reviewed
The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…
Seize the moment: Undercurrent, by Barney Norris, reviewed
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…
How the travel industry convinced us we needed holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
The bizarre history of London’s private members’ clubs
At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the…
Propaganda from the Russian Front: The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman, reviewed
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
How Alice Prin conquered bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
We do love to be beside the seaside
In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…
Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed
Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should…
It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed
Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…
More stirring stories of little ships
‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that…
The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Slavoj Zizek: the philosopher who annoys all the right people
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
What exactly do we mean by the mind?
Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…
The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
A gay journey of self-discovery
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
