Books
Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…
Staggering to Jerusalem — a journey from darkness into light
Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The…
Has Tibet finally lost out to China?
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover…
The modern celebrity silk: Geoffrey Robertson ticks all the boxes
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…
The great outdoors is a short walk from your front door
When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…
A Weekend in New York, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer —…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get…
A love letter to the short story
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a…
The industrial kling-klang of ‘Krautrock’
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones…
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become,…
How Steven Spurrier enraged the French — and was never forgiven
Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the…
From Don Quixote to My Struggle — a survey of the novel in 160 pages
I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and…
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…
Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus
In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States…
Swept away by Hitler’s charisma: German women gush over the Führer
The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived…
Dickens and Agatha Christie made my childhood bearable
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in…
When trendy ideas capture the ruling elite, democracy can go hang
If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on…
Lucia, by Alex Pheby, reviewed
In 1988, James Joyce’s grandson Stephen destroyed all letters he had from, to or about his aunt Lucia Joyce, the…
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the…
The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards
‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…
Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of…
