Books
’I know it when I see it’ – anti-Semitism for dummies
Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped…
Discover your inner wolf and lead a better life
For a practical at medical school on the subject of the nervous system, it was thought unwise to wire students…
What the Ancient Greeks did for us
I am undoubtedly, alas, an example of what the Fowler brothers, H.W. and F.G., of The King’s English fame, would…
An exposé of high-ranking gays in the Catholic Church bears the fingerprints of the Pope’s closest advisors
The publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by the French gay polemicist Frédéric Martel has been meticulously timed…
How my mother survived the Nazis, but took her own life
When the poet George Szirtes returned as an adult to Budapest, the city of his birth which he had left…
Tolkien in Africa: Black Leopard Red Wolf, by Marlon James, reviewed
Anyone who has issues with Tolkien (at 16, even in a suitably ‘altered state’, I could not finish The Hobbit,…
John Ruskin: the making of a modern prophet
At the time of his death in 1900, John Ruskin was, according to Andrew Hill, ‘perhaps the most famous living…
How fear and loathing of Nixon sent Hunter S. Thompson crazy
Hunter Stockton Thompson blazed across the republic of American arts and letters for too short a time. When in February…
Seeing and believing: the best spiritual films of Europe’s golden age
The Italian film director Federico Fellini was not known for his piety (far from it), yet towards the end of…
The unearthly powers of the North Pole
Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast.…
Fiction for the #MeToo age: Victory, by James Lasdun, reviewed
James Lasdun is my favourite ‘should be famous’ writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling. His eye-boggling psychological thrillers are…
The powerful magnetism of James Clerk Maxwell
Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it,…
Hitting the bull’s-eye: Hark, by Sam Lipsyte, reviewed
This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt…
No escape from grief: Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li, reviewed
When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never…
The brutish origins of British liberalism
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones.…
Fun at the EU’s expense: The Capital, by Robert Menasse, reviewed
Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of…
Undercurrents
Former Melbourne detective Colin McLaren’s cold case book into the 2009 disappearance of Bob Chappell and the 2010 conviction of…
Fishing for meaning in vanished Doggerland
Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book…
An island’s dark secrets: The Tempest, by Steve Sem-Sandberg, reviewed
‘I should not have gone back to the island but I did it all the same.’ So begins the Swedish…
Kristen Roupenian’s debut short stories fulfil all expectations
Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went…
Shakespeare on the beach: Oh I Do Like to Be…, by Marie Phillips, reviewed
The phrase ‘Shakespeare comedy’ is an oxymoron with a long pedigree, one which perhaps stretches back to the late 16th…
Treasures from Ancient Egypt’s wastepaper baskets
In 2016, after some unseemly back-and-forth between the Commons and Lords, it was decided that Acts of Parliament should no…
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…
