Books
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…
Has Ann Quin’s time come at last?
Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…
My ex-lover’s T-shirt can join the other tragic tat in the Museum of Broken Relationships
I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s…
What America needs is another Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it…
How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…
