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Houdini looks bound to captivate us forever
Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…
Vain, inbred and inept: how could the Habsburgs have survived so long?
One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who…
Victorian novels to enjoy in lockdown
It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I…
Taxonomy reaches celebrity heights
Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia…
A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…
Did George Formby and Gracie Fields really help Britain out of the Depression?
Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics…
The delicate balance between God and Caesar in modern Britain
At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden…
From the wrestling ring to Plato’s Cave in one easy throw
One of the delights of going to stay with my grandparents in the 1970s was that my grandmother was a…
Homage to Lyra McKee — the journalist I miss most
In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist…
From blue to pink: Looking for Eliza, by Leaf Arbuthnot, reviewed
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…
Where are the Henry Kissingers when we need them?
It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that…
Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown
Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…
Another alien in our midst: Pew, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
William Sitwell’s history of eating out reminds us painfully of what we’re missing
In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…
We don’t talk of a ‘working father’ — so why do we still refer to a ‘working mother’?
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
The art of negotiation: Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, reviewed
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure
When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…
The symbolism of Orion, the hunter of the heavens
What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…
The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…
Much-hyped technological innovation isn’t necessarily progress
Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…
Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…
Roger Scruton’s swan song: salvation through Parsifal
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…
Would you kill for a cup of coffee?
In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup…
Sadness and scandal: Hinton, by Mark Blacklock, reviewed
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…
