Books
Less radical, less rich: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again is a disappointment
Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning Olive Kitteridge (2008) is the novel I recommend to friends who don’t read much. Talk about…
Free of Lucian Freud — Celia Paul’s road to fulfilment
I was looking the other day at a video of the artist Celia Paul in conversation with the curator of…
The surrealism of war against Isis
The campaign against Isis was pretty big news for most of 2016. But by the time the final showdown got…
John Lennon’s friend imagines
For several years in the 1950s Peter Jones shared a desk with John Lennon at Quarry Bank High School for…
Letters: How to squash a Speaker
No special protection Sir: Rod Liddle’s joke that the election might be held on a date when Muslims cannot vote,…
Books of the year – part one
Philip Hensher The best novels of the year were Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and James Meek’s To…
Vladimir Nabokov confesses to butterflies in the stomach
Not every novelist has opinions. Some of the greatest have a touch of the idiot savant, such as Adalbert Stifter,…
It’s a dull world in which children don’t challenge their parents
On the Shoulders of Giants consists of 12 essays that the late Umberto Eco gave as lectures at the annual…
Picturing paradise: the healing power of art
Some 35 years ago I visited the National Gallery of Sicily in Palermo on the hunt for the ‘Virgin Annunciate’…
Rescuing the great British Cheddar
Gastronomy is one of the deepest forms of culture. If you’ve grown up in France you know this, to the…
How to message a Martian
Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of…
A tribute to the grandes dames of gardening — Beth Chatto and Penelope Hobhouse
There is no longer much point buying strictly practical gardening books, such as were a staple of the publishing industry…
There’s no end to the wonders of the human body, says Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson has come a long way from being the funniest, most irreverent travel writer around. He’s still as amiable,…
Dieting to death: a black comedy of boarding school life
It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of…
When atheists stole the moral high ground
In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner…
Liberty depends on a delicate balance between state and society
Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have…
Three dashing Frenchmen captivate Victorian London
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat —…
Crime fiction: a sole survivor is haunted by a family tragedy on a remote Scottish island
James Sallis has a modus operandi: never to waste a word. Sarah Jane (No Exit Press, £8.99) follows this stricture…
As well as being a mythic tale, Moby-Dick is a superb a guide to oceanography
Anyone who has read Moby-Dick will recognise the moment, 32 chapters in, when their line of attention, hitherto slackly paying…
Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new essays brim with sense and sensibility
There is a moment in one of the longer pieces in Surfacing, Kathleen Jamie’s luminous new collection of essays, when…
The real villain of the House of York was Richard III’s elder brother
Trying to describe the outcome of the Wars of the Roses — the fall of the House of York —…
My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel
In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character…
Spooky stories for Halloween
It is surely significant that Ed Parnell’s first novel The Listeners was an updated examination of themes latent in Walter…
Debbie Harry makes the perfect pop star
My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a…
Is there no field in which the Jewish mindset doesn’t excel?
More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that…
