Books
When kissing in public carried a death sentence
I once threw Tony Parker’s Lighthouse across the fo’c’sle of a ship at sea when I read that his characters…
Travelling by train – with Anna Karenina
Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been…
How I tried – and spectacularly failed – to assist my mother’s suicide
‘If your time ain’t come, not even a doctor can kill you’ — so goes the proverb that best echoes…
Twilight in the bayou: The New Iberia Blues, by James Lee Burke, reviewed
The king of crime fiction doesn’t need a crown and sceptre. Every page proclaims his majesty. James Lee Burke has…
The day I woke up… to hear that only Tracey Thorn loved me
It’s unusual for musicians to become writers. The trajectory of yearning is meant to be the other way around. When…
Do we really need to read Isaiah Berlin’s every last word?
This is a fascinating example of a small genre, in which the author decides at an early stage in his…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
An intellectual dynasty: the Darwins, Wedgwoods and their notable intermarriages
Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of…
Demography has become the biggest story on the planet
One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too…
The end of the world is nigh: the latest short stories reviewed
Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an…
Kazakhstan is about the size of Europe — but we know almost nothing about it
Kazakhstan, say signs by the side of the road in this vast Central Asian country, is ‘a land of unity…
Our public schools now resemble five-star hotels — with a Russian and Asian clientele
Deplore it or revere it, you cannot but respect the private school industry’s wart-like survival in modern Britain. Has any…
The Australian James Joyce: the novels of Gerald Murnane reviewed
Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or…
Where would we be without crime’s heavies? Muscle, by Alan Trotter, reviewed
Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would…
Spinning yarns: uplifting stories told through needlework
In this unusual book, part memoir, part history, Clare Hunter offers a personal meditation on the textile arts. Sewing and…
The hot-headed youth who played straight into Hitler’s hands
On 7 November 1938, the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris. Claiming to have secret papers,…
Cycle of violence: Blood, by Maggie Gee, reviewed
Maggie Gee has written 14 novels including The White Family, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s…
The scramble for Africa goes back many centuries
A thought kept recurring as I read Toby Green’s fascinating and occasionally frustrating book on the development of West Africa…
Will we ever unravel the mysteries of Kabbalah?
In an age where ‘authenticity’ is prized above all things (even if what this actually means is that — like,…
Auberon Waugh — a demon on the page, an angel off it
Auberon Waugh was happy to admit that most journalism is merely tomorrow’s chip paper but, of all the journalists of…
The internet was never intended to spy on us
There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately —…
The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?
What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in…
One hundred years on, could we cope with a new flu pandemic?
Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here.…
Beware the female stalker: Dream Sequence, by Adam Foulds, reviewed
Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on…
The ghostly Thames: Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, reviewed
While its shape is famous — prominent on maps of London and Oxford — the Thames is ‘unmappable’, according to…
