Books
Holy mackerel! Civilisation begins with fishing
Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the…
Sex and sycophancy at Rolling Stone
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous…
The great Tudor catfight
Apart from glorying in a memorable name, Lettice Knollys has chiefly been known for her connections — with her second…
The 67 words that ensured endless bloodshed
If books about the Israeli-Arab conflict were building blocks, the Palestinians would have their own state already and then some.…
Horatio Clare breaks the ice with the taciturn Finns
In this slim travel book Horatio Clare voyages as a guest on the Finnish icebreaker Otso (Bear), ‘mostly in darkness,…
Menus on the wild side
The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an…
Susie Boyt neatly skewers the self-help trends
Grief is not being able to eat a small boiled egg. ‘Could you face an egg?’ the widowed Jean asks…
More menace – and magic – on the moors
Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the…
Ted Lewis: the great British crime writer you’ve never heard of
If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat,…
A chance to see the Moomins’ creator for the genius she really was: Tove Janssons reviewed
Tove Jansson, according to her niece’s husband, was a squirt in size and could rarely be persuaded to eat, preferring…
Books of the year
A.N. Wilson Elmet by Fiona Mozley (John Murray, £10.99). It is difficult to convey the full horror of this spellbinding…
A decade of famine and purges: the murderous 1930s under Stalin
He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler.…
Reaping the whirlwind of climate change
I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how…
Writers’ Letters: Charlotte Brontë
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Brilliant essayists, dark and fair
Read cover to cover, a book of essays gives you the person behind it: their voice, the trend of their…
What does ‘Guernica’ really symbolise?
It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura…
Nothing’s coming up roses in the garden these days
Emotional geography is now a recognised academic subject. Is emotional botany heading the same way? This is a year for…
Mussolini’s fall from grace
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with…
High wire act
‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation…
The enigma of Enric Marco
Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil…
Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?
Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…
Gerry Adams: from jail to the Dail
When I recently asked a sardonic Northern Irish friend what historical figures Gerry Adams resembled, the tasteless reply came back:…
People and place: an outstanding archive of rural Britain
In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard…
Ali Smith’s Winter is calm, cool and consoling
In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge…
A book about sleep that will keep you up all night
I’ve read several books about sleep recently, and their authors all tell me the same three things. The first is…
