More from Books
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
In praise of burning pianos
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Must we now despise colonial architecture too?
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
Who planned Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s murder?
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage: On Java Road, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history: Ancestry, by Simon Mawer, reviewed
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dark days in Hollywood: Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra, reviewed
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
The sad, extraordinary life of Basil Bunting
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Behind the Five Eyes intelligence alliance
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
The lost world of the Karoo
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
What has become of the 19th-century explosion of religiosity?
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
Is self-loathing the British disease?
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
When did cheerfulness get so miserable?
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
A frictionless history of fieldwork: In Search of Us reviewed
To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…
The well of happiness – and despair: Queer St Ives reviewed
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
The Everybody Inn: what happened when a hotel opened its doors to the homeless?
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
The folly of garden cities
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
A child’s-eye view of the not-so-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
The sweet and sour sides of growing up in a Chinese takeaway
Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they…
An authentic portrait of gay love in small-town Britain: The Whale Tattoo reviewed
In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set…
