Books
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Writers’ letters: Evelyn Waugh on Auberon Waugh
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Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
The spirits of the age
Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising…
More secrets and symbols
Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…
A dense, angry fable
Set partly in a future surveillance society, partly in ancient Carthage and 1970s Ethiopia, partly in contemporary Greece and London…
A sensual Greek goddess
Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…
Help over the hump
Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the…
A Muslim’s insights into Christianity
I’m not a critic, I’m an enthusiast. And when you are an enthusiast you need to try your best to…
Racism is a grey area
This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…
How to be good
Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His…
Animals make us human
There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen…
The martyrdom of Proust
Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by…
A choice of first novels
Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The…
Unearthly powers
This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family…
The pilgrims’ ways
Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat
Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
Three daemons in a boat
Philip Pullman’s new k, the prequel to his Northern Lights series — the one north Oxford academics very much prefer…
Lend me your ears
Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the…
Hunt the lady’s slipper
Who would want to read a whole book about a teenage boy’s gap year? When most 18-year-olds take time off…
Something scary in the attic
How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but…
Broken dreams
In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and…
A revolutionary act
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. Whilst this quote is often attributed to…
Songs of the blood and the sword
Douglas Murray 28 October 2017 9:00 am
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…