Books
When Decca records were part of everyday life
In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett published his debut hardboiled novel Red Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí began…
Taking pride in household chores really can ease depression
There are many books about what it’s like to live with mental illness and the aftermath of child sexual abuse.…
Something in the air: Broken Ghost, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of a rave on the shores of a mountain lake above Aberystwyth, with three…
Sympathy for literature’s least unheroic characters
Whether we see the primary cause as being postmodernism (for decades we’ve been told that our master narratives no longer…
When the Grand Design met ‘le Grand Non’: Britain in the early 1960s
Peter Hennessy is a national treasure. He is driven by a romantic, almost sensual, fascination with British history, culture, and…
If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret
Georges Simenon, creator of the sombre, pipe-smoking Paris detective Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and money relentlessly. By the time…
Novel explosives of the Cold War
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by…
We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy
My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome…
From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy
This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should…
A single man of no fortune must be in want of a job: younger sons in Jane Austen’s England
Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure…
Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew
How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with…
The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames
The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore.…
Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?
There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles…
A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part
Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
A novel take on the Western: Inland, by Téa Obreht, reviewed
Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
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…
