Books
How Enoch Powell fancied himself Viceroy of India — and other startling revelations
Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat: the triumph of Rorke’s Drift
On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement: On this…
How Eric Clapton’s racism sparked a musical revolution
On 13 August 1977, a demonstration by the National Front was routed in the streets of Lewisham by thousands of…
The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke
Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…
Is the threat of capital punishment really the foundation of good behaviour?
Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems…
Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…
Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…
Pitches in the boardroom: football’s future assured
This is a story of resurrection. A mere three decades ago, club football in England was a professional game largely…
Investigative journalists: new crime fiction reviewed
Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller,…
Hungary is being led once again down a dangerous nationalistic path
Norman Stone has already written, with a brilliant blend of humour, understanding and scepticism, histories of the Eastern Front, Turkey,…
Should William Penn be shaking in his grave?
The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a…
Partying with John and Yoko: The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, reviewed
Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts…
Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed
There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…
It’s a lifetime of hard work being an artist
Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found…
Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed
From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…
Make it a new year’s resolution to be less active
As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of…
Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution
In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…
Catchwords for today — what’s in, what’s out
The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David…
What did the Romans ever do for London?
When Bishop Guy of Amiens looked across the Channel in the 11th century he saw ‘teeming London [which] shines bright.…
An Igbo Paradise Lost: An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma, reviewed
Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man…
Life and death in 1970s Belfast: For the Good Times, by David Keenan, reviewed
David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that…
France gets a taste for Bacon
The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…
In Epping Forest’s dark undergrowth
In this current era of identity politics and a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality amongst a younger generation,…
Of the people
This must be the first occasion when a book on politics, written in Australia, has been listed among the year’s…
How Calouste Gulbenkian became the richest man in the world
Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to…
