More from Books
A cursed place: Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, reviewed
Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world…
When did postmodernism begin?
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his…
Favourite books revisited: Rob Doyle’s edgy reading list
‘Male writers now are the opposition party, and that may not be such a bad thing for them.’ So Rob…
The Greeks’ bitter fight for freedom
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has…
Scholars and spectres: The Runes Have Been Cast, by Robert Irwin, reviewed
It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being…
A late fling: Free Love, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
Variations on a theme: To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara, reviewed
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
The march of the larch: the Treeline is now encroaching on the arctic tundra
Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land.…
Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
Were the Sixties really so liberated?
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s
Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…
Don’t be seduced by fake truffle oil this Christmas
Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…
Why America’s attitude to mental illness is dangerously deluded
A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got…
Jan Morris’s last book is a vade mecum to treasure
Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As…
Spot the book title 2021
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All successful spies need to be good actors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
Dancing on Terence Conran’s grave
‘Who,’ asks Stephen Bayley, in one of the ‘S.B’ chapters of this irresistibly spiky co-written book, ‘could countenance working for…
How to tell your Roman emperors apart
Rising professors do well to be controversial if they wish to be invited to contribute to mainstream media. But the…
A keepsake – and to-do list – of Europe’s greatest cathedrals
In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our…
The real surprise contained in a Kinder Surprise Egg
The Rosetta Stone has an awful lot in common with a Kinder Surprise Egg. Hear me out. The actual text…
Children’s books for all ages: the best of 2021
She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig(Little Brown, £20) is about a…
A book trade romp: Sour Grapes, by Dan Rhodes, reviewed
Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man…
Has nostalgia become the Greeks’ national disease?
Imagine a new take on the Greek myth of Pygmalion. A love-shy artist makes a woman out of marble who…
The 17th-century Huron chief Kondiaronk can still teach us valuable lessons
Ten years ago, David Graeber was a leading figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He and his fellow protesters…
Lost in the fog: The Fell, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the…
