Books
Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong
Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…
Does Kim Jong-un deliberately emulate a Bond villain?
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…
Blainey’s blarney
Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s beloved history elder, has written 40 books and his terms like ‘tyranny of distance’ have pervaded our…
Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…
For the inhabitants of Ramallah, ‘home’ is just a memory
On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be…
A child’s-eye view of the world: The Curse of the School Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, reviewed
Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The…
The crime of passion that kept the nation enthralled
No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive…
Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring
Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…
Erotic longings that left me cold
The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less…
Eternal truths: Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry, reviewed
It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around…
Bohemians rhapsodising: the favourite haunts of writers and artists
Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her…
Out of sight, out of mind
Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People,…
In praise of the semicolon, a most maligned punctuation mark
Now, how shall I start this review? I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.) I loved this book,…
Web of deceit: disinformation could prove the most powerful weapon of all
We could begin almost anywhere. But let’s start in Ukraine, with Babar Aliev. Babar is a former gang leader who…
Head to Berlin to hear nightingales sing
In a sense, the song of the bird in the title of this short, hugely thoughtful and fascinating book is…
The Orwellian horror of the Mr Men books
It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma,…
Capers in crime: Life for Sale, by Yukio Mishima, reviewed
Few biographies are quite as impressive as Yukio Mishima’s. One of Japan’s most famous authors, he wrote 80 plays and…
Alas, poor Hamlet — now presumed to be overweight
Do you regard fat as a noun, a food substance all humans eat and need? Or as an adjective, denoting…
A picture of rural Kentucky: Stand by Me, by Wendell Berry, reviewed
Anyone picking up a book by Wendell Berry, whether it be fiction, essays or a collection of his lucid and…
How to interrogate a murderer
This is horrible. But it’s a book by Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, so it’s…
Will Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ ever be finished?
Robert Caro, at the age of 83, continues to work full-time on his grand inquiry into the nature of political…
Searching in vain for the ‘soul’ of modern Russia
It would be hard to have better travel-writer credentials than Sara Wheeler. Here the author of The Magnetic North and…
America’s brutal borstals: The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed
Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a…
Kayaking solo from Shetland to the Channel
After kayaking solo in a November storm to a square mile of rock called Eilean a’Chleirich in the Summer Isles…
They just keep rolling along: the astonishing durability of the Rolling Stones
At the end of 1969, teenage Rolling Stones fans reading the new Fab 208 annual could be forgiven for thinking…
