More from Books
Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Should the Duke of Windsor have been tried for treason?
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Are the English exceptionally gullible?
The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a…
The history of transplants had many false starts
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much…
Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
The poet with many lives
This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the…
Keeping yourself angry, the Hare way: We Travelled, by David Hare, reviewed
A character in David Hare’s Skylight claims she has at last found contentment by no longer opening newspapers or watching…
Oliver Cromwell: ruthless in battle – but nice to his men
One of the first retrospective accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s early career, Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from…
How we did the locomotion: A Brief History of Motion, by Tom Standage, reviewed
Audi will make no more fuel engines after 2035. So that’s the end of the Age of Combustion, signalled by…
The roots of conflict: The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
The Island of Missing Trees feels like a strange title until you realise how hard Elif Shafak makes trees work…
David Keenan, literary disruptor in chief
Near to the heart of this wild and labyrinthine novel — on page 516 of 808 — a character in…
Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
Borges: the man and the brand
‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and…
More than one bad apple: the sorry demise of English cider
Can you imagine if, in the 20th century, wine producers in France had switched from a product made (almost) entirely…
It all started with Dracula
The title of the journalist Paul Kenyon’s second book on crazy leadership, Children of the Night, leaves the reader in…
The musical gravy train: Leaving The Building, by Eamonn Forde, reviewed
Musicians cast a long cultural shadow. Politicians may wield considerable power in their time, but although today’s young people are…
Lucy Ellmann is angry about everything, especially men
Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was…
The AI future looks positively rosy
In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women…
The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an eye-opener for classical scholars
The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and…
When family viewing was full of creeping menace
Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric…
Startlingly sadistic: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, reviewed
There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well…
