More from Books
A call to farms: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood.…
Plain tales of crookedness and corruption: Rogues reviewed
Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel,…
The forgotten heroines of the Middle Ages
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s…
Spikes and stagnant growth: why we are where we are
We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and…
Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po
It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length…
Reclaiming the siege of Leningrad from the Russian state: Living Pictures reviewed
Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts…
Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Hysterical outbursts: Bewitched, by Jill Dawson, reviewed
‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go…
The wonder of the wandering life
Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…
Why should advocating sexual restraint be ridiculed?
Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’…
The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…
Putin’s mistake was to discard the velvet glove
To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature…
All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
How inoculation against smallpox became all the rage in Russia
The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book…
At last, a book about James Joyce that makes you laugh
I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I…
Dangerous liaisons: Bad Eminence, by James Greer, reviewed
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…
Michael Beloff QC drops names – but they’re not the ones we’re curious about
‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent,…
We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…
Where is Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled cryptoqueen, hiding?
This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human…
The conspiracy against women’s football
The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC…
The unimaginable horrors confronting the Allies in 1945
No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what…
People of little interest: MI5’s view of left-wing intellectuals
If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…
The emperor as ruler of heaven and Earth
Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book…
‘That little venal borough’: a poet’s jaundiced view of Aldeburgh
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
Ethel, Ella and all that jazz: the soundtrack of a Chicago childhood
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…
