Books
Mission statement: the importance of a fine British embassy
At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively…
From Adonis to Prometheus: the beautiful men of myth
Stephen Fry has had a go at the Greek myths, in a competitively priced hardback, just in time for Christmas.…
What on earth was The Prisoner all about?
Now, if someone were to spray stun gas through the keyhole of my front door, and I were to collapse…
Christmas quiz – The answers
Weird world 1. Cannabis 2. Che Guevara 3. Tesco 4. Asda 5. Beauty and the Beast 6. Georgia 7. France…
Spot the Classical Music – The answers
1. The Planets (Holst) 2. The Nutcracker Suite (Tchaikovsky) 3. Fingal’s Cave (Mendelssohn) 4. Enigma Variations (Elgar) 5. Choral Symphony…
The joy of Japanese puzzles – The answers
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Books of 2017 – reviewed
When we look back at 2017 we will probably remember it as a year of minor issues that turned into…
How cool is your fridge?
Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the…
Christmas quiz books galore
There can be few challenges more daunting for the assiduous reviewer than a pile of Christmas ‘gift’ books sitting on…
The short, reckless life of Andrea Dunbar
In her debut novel, Adelle Stripe recounts the brief, defiant life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar was raised on…
Writers’ Letters: Virginia Woolf
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Midwinter murders: the best Christmas thrillers
It’s difficult to keep a crime series going after 11 books but Boris Akunin manages it well in All the…
What will Katie Hopkins do next?
In her memoir Rude, the former Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins reveals her true self. She does this by accident,…
Bob Dylan is a modern-day Odysseus
‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’…
Love and letters in a Bloomsbury triangle
Dora Carrington (1893–1932) was at the heart of the Bloomsbury story. As an art student, she encountered the love of…
Jesmyn Ward sees dead people
The events of this book take place where the world of the living and the world of the dead rub…
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…
