Books
Back to basics
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all…
Rare beauty
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
Thrills and spills
Before reading this book, the only thing I knew about Action Park was that it had lent its name to…
Juggling a hot potato
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is…
No love lost
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir…
How do they do it?
Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On…
The strain of keeping mum
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love…
Sad and beautiful
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work…
In cold blood
Sharks may inspire fear and loathing, but we are the crueller predators, says Philip Hoare
A great public servant
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane…
Deeply disturbing
Sorry For Your Trouble (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song.…
Sweetness and light
Who would imagine that Johann Zoffany’s celebrated 1780 depiction of the extensive Sharp family happily making music on their pleasure…
All change
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
Fowl indignity
It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in…
Dark secrets
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
Only human after all
Ludwig von Beethoven belongs among those men whom not only Vienna and Germany, but Europe and our entire age revere.…
In bad odour
Michael Bywater wonders why the existence of smell still seems such a guilty secret
How to while away the winter
Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a…
What’s the world coming to?
It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my…
Base politics
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York moved to the lectern. It was the Cow Palace in San Francisco in…
Bedwetter’s lament
The trouble with political memoirs is that it’s very hard to get the balance right between the book-length version of…
The psychedelic scene
There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in…
Bad science exposed
Research has always been susceptible to fraud, but regulations are now much tighter than they were, says David Wootton
Progress is painful
One of my long-held beliefs is that evolutionary biology should be taught extensively in schools. There may be some objections…
How are the mighty fallen
Greg Woolf didn’t know his book would come out during an urban crisis. Thanks to coronavirus, Venice’s population, for example,…
