Books
The most bizarre museum heist ever
They don’t look like a natural pair. First there’s the author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, a hero of America’s war in…
Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…
A disturbing psychological experiment involving secrecy, small boys and sharp knives
Gina Perry is the eminent psychologist who blew apart Stanley Milgram’s shocking revelations from his 1961 research. Milgram had caused…
Britain was utterly wretched in 1975. No wonder Europe seemed a better bet
‘I voted to stay in a common market. No one ever mentioned a political union.’ It is the complaint of…
The tragedy of Syria: how protest spiralled into savagery
The fateful day five years ago began like any other for the family. A pot of black tea with cardamon…
Will ‘I’m a Tudorbethan, Get Me Out of Here’ be hitting our screens soon?
Are books becoming an adjunct to TV? Both of these are good reads, but both feel influenced by — and…
An intense conversation about life, love and writing with Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy draws her epigraph for The Cost of Living from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities: ‘You’re always more unreal to yourself…
The daring exploits of Romain Gary
When Romain Gary, a courageous and much decorated pilot in the RAF’s Free French squadron, was presented to the Queen…
From Stalin’s poetry to Saddam’s romances: the terrible prose of tyrants
‘Reading makes the world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect… Reading is love in action.’ Those are…
A single mother hits rock bottom in Tokyo: Territory of Light reviewed
Before her death two years ago, Yuko Tsushima was a powerful voice in Japanese literature; a strong candidate for the…
How I singlehandedly kept the Will Self industry going
In 1994, Matthew De Abaitua, an aspiring writer and student on East Anglia’s Creative Writing MA, applies for a job…
Texas: the myriad contradictions of the Lone Star state
The subtitle of Lawrence Wright’s splendid God Save Texas (‘A Journey into the Future of America’) would be alarming if…
Is there no end to books on the ‘end of France’?
Here is a detail that says a lot. In the French translation of this latest book by the Israeli historian…
Did the Grenfell Tower fire put paid to the social housing ideal?
As a schoolboy, I used to go round to my best mate Mike’s home. It was a good place: a…
For the man who has everything, only a space rocket will do
Today’s VHNWI wants a PRSHLS. That’s Very High Net-Worth Individual and Partially Reuseable Super Heavy Lift System. Or, in the…
Guess who’s coming to dinner with Angela Huth?
Anglea Huth, the broadcaster and author of some 18 books, has now written her memoirs, Not the Whole Story. And…
Pathos and humanity in pictures of abject misery
In 1971 the late Linda Nochlin burst onto the public scene with her groundbreaking essay, ‘Why Have There Been No…
What does John Gray’s anti-atheism amount to?
K. Chesterton, in one of his wise and gracious apothegms, once wrote that ‘When Man ceases to worship God he…
Our sheltered lives have made us overly fearful: Aminatta Forna’s Happiness reviewed
In her keynote lecture for a conference on ‘The Muse and the Market’ in 2015 Aminatta Forna mounted a powerful…
There’s much of Astrid Lindgren in the carrot-haired rebel Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Longstocking is a nine-year-old girl who lives alone with a monkey and horse in a cottage called Villa Villekulla…
Oddballs and lefties
Ah, populism: is it a fulsome democratic expression of giving people what they want or merely join-the-dots fear-mongering? Bit of…
The codes and codswallop surrounding Leonardo da Vinci
‘If you look at walls soiled with a variety of stains or at stones with variegated patterns,’ Leonardo da Vinci…
The changing face of war and heroism
On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
Six wintry days in Saratoga Springs: Upstate by James Wood reviewed
Alan Querry, the central figure in James Wood’s second novel, is someone who, in his own words, doesn’t ‘think about…
