Books
The way to dusty death
In the words of Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer: ‘We’re all doomed.’ Life remains a dangerous business whose outcome is always…
Risking all for the perfect mocha coffee
‘This guy’s crazy,’ says a taxi driver, listening to a BBC interview with a man who has decided to become…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
How electronic dance music took over the world
It was approximately 4.50 a.m. in Ibiza: peak time on the dance floor. I was on the decks in one…
Classic whodunnit
How many readers know the answer to the question, ‘After the Bible and Shakespeare, who is the biggest selling author…
The murder of a harmless Hampstead eccentric remains shrouded in mystery
‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and…
Enrico Fermi: nuclear physicist and childish practical joker
Enrico Fermi may not be a name as familiar as Einstein, Feynman or Hawking, but he was one of the…
How Raffles stole the jewel of Singapore
Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a…
The subtle magic of Antony Gormley wraps the world
Martin Caiger-Smith’s huge monograph on Antony Gormley slides out of its slipcase appropriately enough like a block of cast iron.…
For Julian Barnes, the only story is a love story — and it’s inevitably sad
The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century…
Corruption, corruption, corruption: the full story of Miami vice
Sullying the glorious sunshine, sand and sea, Miami in the 1940s, when I first ventured there, was already overcrowded, vulgar…
Could the Odyssey have been the work of a woman after all?
Until recently, it seemed we were living in an age of Iliads. Since 2007, the ancient Homeric epic has been…
Was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really away with the fairies?
When this survey of British fairydom arrived I turned to the chapter on Dorset to read about the little people…
Fairy tales for feisty girls
This being the centenary of women’s suffrage, there’s an unmissable feminist aspect to children’s books right now. Stories about strong…
Françoise Frankel: a spirited woman on the run in Occupied France
Françoise Frenkel was a Polish Jew, who adored books and spent much of her early life studying and working in…
Michelle de Kretser: the modern Australian Jane Austen
Twenty-odd pages into Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, I pounded the table and bellowed an Australian-accented ‘fuck yeah!’…
Culinary cold war at the White House
‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.’ The best known adage in food literature,…
Leeches, bats and toxic sap in Borneo’s Eden
Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare…
An 80th birthday party causes no end of trouble in Barney Norris’s latest novel
‘People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them,’ muses the…
Ethnic cleansing and the horrors of Buczacz
I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Getting women on board: the history of the WRNS
This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy…
Jenny Erpenbeck finds a novel way to tackle the migrant problem
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires,…
Year of Ferrari
2017 was of course the year of Ferrari, as one of the most recognised luxury brands on the planet celebrated…
Australia was ruined the moment Europeans set foot there
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down…
