Books
Edward Garnett and his diligent blue pencil
Edward Garnett, radical, pacifist, freethinker, Russophile man of letters, was from the 1890s onwards for many years the pre-eminent fixer…
Fame of Hall
Anne Watson’s book underlines the truth that in order to praise Jørn Utzon, whose architectural vision created the concept of…
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Mary Wesley’s passionate lifelong love affair
The novelist Mary Wesley never forgot the night of 26 October 1944. She was then 32, locked in a loveless…
A survey of this year’s children’s books sets the cat among the pigeons
Back in 1990, Roald Dahl wrote a book called The Minpins, which was illustrated by Patrick Benson, a very good…
Naples drowns in deluge and corruption
There are nods to dark masters in Malacqua — undercurrents of Kafka, a drumbeat of Beckett — but Nicola Pugliese’s…
The real reason for the fall of Rome? Climate change
Why did the Roman Empire collapse? It’s a question that’s been puzzling writers ever since Edward Gibbon wrote The History…
Sisters under the skin: Han Kang’s The White Book reviewed
Before the narrator of The White Book is born, her mother has another child; two months premature, the baby dies…
Did the modern world really begin in 1947?
I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told…
Has Paul Theroux finally lost it?
As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I…
A love letter to Turkey’s lost past
Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the…
Secrets of an abused aristocratic childhood
Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the…
Geoffrey Clarke’s imaginative talents knew no bounds
At the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) was buying fast cars and flying…
The rich literature of the game of poker
According to the subtitle, this is a collection of ‘short stories of long nights at the poker table’. Were that…
On the run with Martin Luther King’s assassin
This newly translated novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is really two books, spliced together in alternating chapters.…
Writers’ Letters: Edith Sitwell
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Is Jewish humour the greatest defence mechanism ever created?
If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather…
Caroline of Ansbach: the best of the Hanoverians
It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets…
The BBC’s battle for Britain
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with…
Sex and the city: the best art books of the year
‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this.…
Wonder is all around
Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of…
Milton’s blinding reading list
In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he…
Writer’s Letters: Ernest Hemingway on James Jones
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A crime novel that continues to puzzle
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
