Books
How to organise everything — Judith Flanders’s history of finding things
In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself…
Animation lends itself readily to propaganda
Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by…
There are more negatively-loaded words than positive ones — so what?
Negativity has a power over us. You know how it is. One bad thing can ruin your whole day, even…
Albanian literary icon Ismail Kadare revisits ‘home’
Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native…
His own worst critic? Clive James the poet
Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of…
How David Rosenhan’s fraudulent Thud experiment set back psychiatry for decades
In 1973, a social psychologist from Stanford perpetrated one of the greatest scientific frauds of recent history. Its consequences still resonate today, says Andrew Scull
Babies are aware of bilingualism from birth — if not before
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a…
Rembrandt remains an enigma
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one…
The Pearl Harbor fiasco need never have happened
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…
We were highly amused: the Queen — and Mrs Thatcher — thought Ken Dodd tattyfilarious
Doddy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of tickling sticks. So also hath the rest of…
Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao
Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes.…
The wanderings of Ullis: Low, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed
Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in…
Desperate to preserve her sister Jane’s reputation, Cassandra Austen lost her own
Poor Cassy. The Miss Austen of this novel’s title is Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister. She was to have married Thomas…
Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease
Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you…
In this golden age of corruption, it takes much courage to be a whistleblower
Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to…
Does questioning women about their sex lives constitute harassment?
Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure,…
How did the infamous Josef Mengele escape punishment?
The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that…
White House gossip
When the brilliant American biographer, Robert A. Caro, first approached the task of writing a biography of the 36th President…
Carrying on loving: Elizabeth Hardwick’s and Robert Lowell’s remarkable correspondence throughout the 1970s
Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. Interest in Lowell’s…
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing
Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did,…
Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square
The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’…
A lovable, impossible man: Bryan Robertson, gifted curator and Spectator critic
Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of…
Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive…
Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…
