More from Books
We all breathe – 25,000 times a day – so why aren’t we better at it?
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all…
The world’s largest, rarest owl is used for target practice in Siberia
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
If you spent a day at Action Park you took your life in your hands
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to…
Oxford skulduggery: The Sandpit, by Nicholas Shakespeare, reviewed
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
Good memoir-writing should also be self-critical
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir…
The sex life of the Monarch butterfly is positively wild
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On…
Natalie Wood’s death remains a mystery
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love…
Sad and beautiful: The Dear Departed, by Brian Moore, reviewed
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work…
R.B. Haldane: a great public servant, much maligned
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane…
His latest disturbing short stories show Richard Ford very much on song
Sorry For Your Trouble (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song.…
A power for good: the Sharp family were a model of vision and humanitarianism
Who would imagine that Johann Zoffany’s celebrated 1780 depiction of the extensive Sharp family happily making music on their pleasure…
False pretences: No-Signal Area, by Robert Perisic, reviewed
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
The West’s industrial-sized chicken farms could be as dangerous as any wet market
It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in…
Dark secrets: The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett, reviewed
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
If we stop idolising Beethoven we might understand him better
Ludwig von Beethoven belongs among those men whom not only Vienna and Germany, but Europe and our entire age revere.…
Iceland is bursting with cabinets of curiosities
Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a…
The shape of things to come – from artificial wombs to suicide coffins
It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my…
The Sixties vibe: Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell, reviewed
There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in…
Saying yes slowly is what’s hampering progress today
One of my long-held beliefs is that evolutionary biology should be taught extensively in schools. There may be some objections…
The famous cities of the ancient world were surprisingly small and fragile
Greg Woolf didn’t know his book would come out during an urban crisis. Thanks to coronavirus, Venice’s population, for example,…
Spotting the mountweazels: The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams, reviewed
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Children’s books provide the perfect escape from coronovirus
The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie…
Monuments to the second world war are looking increasingly dodgy
Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they…
Let’s swap murders: Amanda Craig’s The Golden Rule reviewed
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
Imperialism is far from over, but gathering force in disguise
From ancient times, empires have risen and fallen, driven by war, territorial acquisition, trade, plunder, religion, ideology, technology, culture and…
