More from Books
Pre-crime has arrived in China
The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…
Scaling the heights: a woman’s experience of mountain climbing
In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales…
Smugglers’ gold: Winchelsea, by Alex Preston, reviewed
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
A guide to the apothecary’s garden
On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some…
The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble
An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely…
Adapt or die: what the natural world can teach us about climate change
Climate change may be the central challenge of our century, but almost all attention has focused on its consequences for…
What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?
The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what…
Dystopian horror: They, by Kay Dick, reviewed
Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in…
Man of mystery: Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, by Jean-Paul Dubois, reviewed
For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary…
For Glasgow – with love and squalor: The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh, reviewed
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…
The Georgians feel closer to us now than the Victorians
‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when…
A tale of love and grim determination: Zorrie, by Laird Hunt, reviewed
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a…
Rejecting the Raj: Gandhi’s acolytes in the West
Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate…
The dark story behind Bambi, the book Hitler banned
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the…
The misery memoir of a devoted polyamorist
The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his…
How the net finally closed on the Nazi henchman Andrei Sawoniuk
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his…
The great Chinese puzzle: how to adapt the language to modern communication technologies
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One…
The women who changed American cuisine forever
What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers.…
Confused lives: It’s Getting Dark, by Peter Stamm, reviewed
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something…
Gay and abandoned: A Previous Life, by Edmund White, reviewed
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Celebrating Konstantin Paustovsky — hailed as ‘the Russian Proust’
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The novels that became instant classics
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk…
A topsy-turvy world: Peaces, by Helen Oyeyemi, reviewed
At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon.…
Should we blame our ancestors for slavery when we’re equally culpable?
The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore…
Emperor for three years: the doomed reign of Maximilian I of Mexico
On 8 April 1864 an Austrian archduke with a penchant for daydreaming agreed to be emperor of Mexico. As Edward…
