Books
Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea
Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities,…
Ian McEwan’s anti-Brexit satire is a damp squib
Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
Jessie Burton’s The Confession is, frankly, a bit heavy-handed
Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s…
Is the judiciary really so bad at judging character?
When I had a cough last week, my son Joe, who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears.…
Visiting the world’s masterpieces is a quixotic undertaking
From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has…
A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir…
A dog’s life is infinitely superior to our own — so let’s embrace it
The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a…
Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is even better on second reading
Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking…
A ménage à trois that worked: Ivan Turgenev and the Viardots
If we still bemoan a world of mass tourism, the mid 19th century, Orlando Figes reminds us, is where it…
Round North Korea with Michael Palin in rose-tinted spectacles
Michael Palin in North Korea, a two-part documentary in which the Python is given a tightly choreographed tour of that…
It’s easy to forget how undemocratic Europe was 50 years ago
The subtitle of Simon Reid-Henry’s substantial work indicates its thesis: ‘The remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971–2017.’…
As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker
Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited…
Why have the Swedes been incapable of finding Olof Palme’s murderer?
Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
Quo vadis?
How did it come to this? When did the constitutional right of the US Senate to ‘advise and consent’ on…
For millennials, pre-Thatcher Britain must seem another — quite mystifying — country
Lymeswold; Hi-de-Hi!; nuclear-free zones; Walkmans; the Metro; Red Robbo; the SDP; Michael Foot’s Cenotaph donkey-jacket; Protest and Survive; Steve Davis…
Everything you always wanted to know about classical music but were afraid to ask
Novelist, essayist, painter, poet, composer. Oh yes, and pianist: Stephen Hough does all of these things very well — and…
Gales and Gaels — sailing solo from Cornwall to the Summer Isles
This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his…
An uncanny gift for prophecy — the genius of Michel Houellebecq
The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially…
In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of
Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her…
Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s
Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s…
Haunted by a black cat: Earwig, by Brian Catling, reviewed
Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist,…
How the Lyons Corner House became a haven for the single working woman
In Whitechapel, in the mid 19th century, rolling and selling cigars was a way for a newly arrived immigrant to…
Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian…
