Books
Dickens’s London is more elusive than the artful dodger himself
Admirers of the novels have always enjoyed identifying their settings where possible, but Dickens’s old haunts are now mainly glimpsed in street names or blue plaques
A trail of dirty money
In 2015, a dedicated DEA agent pursues a Mafia capo involved in a vast cocaine shipment, a Hezbollah militia leader and an elaborate Middle Eastern arms-trafficking ring
Complicated and slightly creepy: the Bogart-Bacall romance
Lauren Bacall was 25 years younger than Humphrey Bogart. Unlike his previous wives, she stayed – though Roger Lewis finds something creepy about their relationship
Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge
The decolonisers in Britain’s universities are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them, says Doug Stokes
Violence in the Valley
When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of one the ‘greenest, quietest, safest’ places in America is shattered
Going for broke
The founding member of the Small Faces was playing an instrument from the age of six, but was forever haunted by the fear of MS, the inherited disease which eventually killed him
Russia’s long history of smears, sabotage and barefaced lies
Mark Hollingsworth describes how the KGB became the world’s most industrious conspiracy-theory factory, with its agents of influence dedicated to sowing maximum confusion
Tales of the Midwest: The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, reviewed
Violence and death are balanced by hard-won, transcendent joy in Beard’s remarkable stories that merge fiction and memoir
The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic
With its carefully calibrated sense of time, the Iliad is clearly the work of a single man and not a ‘rolling snowball’ of different contributions, argues Robin Lane Fox
How the barbarians of the steppes shaped civilisation
The nomadic tribes of Central Asia eventually created vast empires that changed not only their own world but western history, says Kenneth W. Harl
Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?
Grotesque conspiracy theories merge and snowball, with serious global consequences. James Ball proposes a Digital Health System to counter the ‘pathogens’
Other worlds, other lives
A scientist finds a way to access other realities and bequeaths the secret to her daughter. But a dangerous adversary is on the trail
The waking nightmare
After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath
Ghostly grandeur
The history of the magnificent Thames-side palace, with its outrageous shenanigans spanning five centuries, is vividly brought to life by Gareth Russell
Adventures in Greeneland
In skilfully told stories involving luck and changes of fortune, Osborne suggests that it’s not the hand you’re dealt that matters, but how you play it
From revolutionary Paris to the moon
Thirlwell’s protagonist Celine flees malicious gossip in revolutionary France to ponder on sisterly solidarity, patriarchal violence, motherhood, colonialism and slavery
George Orwell’s unacknowledged debt to his wife Eileen
Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s creative influence on her husband George Orwell has been ignored for far too long, says Marina Benjamin
Four disparate intellectuals
Of Wolfram Eilenberger’s four intellectual heroines, Simone Weil alone really counts as a ‘visionary’, forsaking philosophy for a kind of saintly mysticism
Passports out of hell
Roger Moorhouse describes how various diplomats stationed in Europe risked their positions to issue as many forged ‘tickets to safety’ to Jews as possible
Marks out of ten
Like a weary schoolmaster toiling over his pupils’ homework, Peter Kemp dispenses praise, encouragement or reproof to modern fiction’s big-hitters
The good stepmother
Jean entertains her young stepdaughter Leah with drawings and fairy stories – but the two grow sadly estranged in this haunting novel with its own fairy-tale similarities
The world is ablaze – yet climate chaos still takes us by surprise
Our unpreparedness was vividly illustrated by the catastrophic Canadian inferno of 2016 – originally judged a minor brushfire beyond Fort McMurray’s city limits
Black Britons betrayed
Racism in Britain may be less acute than in America or even France, but the false promises made to the Windrush generation have left a bitter aftermath
Tunnels of love
With their elegant entrances and blend of Art Nouveau, Romanticism and Modernism, the white-tiled stations of the Parisian underground are works of art in themselves
Reading, writing and arithmetic – the glorious interrelation of maths and literature
Sarah Hart discusses the Oulipo group, Jorge Luis Borges and Eleanor Catton among other writers who have explored the use of mathematics in their works
