Books
The last great adventure
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
The fruits of imperialism
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Light at the end
It’s an irony of our secular age that the more we fear death, the more enticing we find it. The…
Swine fever
‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch.…
Manning up
Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first…
Making sense of an unjust world
These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the…
The pleasures of reading aloud
‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her…
Rumbles in the jungle
A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…
A tidal wave of grief
Most victims of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake — which convinced Voltaire there could be no God — perished not in…
The man who disappeared
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…
Change and decay
Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated…
In Woolf’s clothing
Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…
The end of brotherly love
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…
A bad taste in the mouth
Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…
The roots of witchcraft
Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…
The search for meaning
He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first…
A countercultural upheaval
‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
Watching from the wings
The story of Sweetpea Slight is a footnote to a footnote in the annals of British theatre. Even her name…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
