Books
Something nasty in the woodshed
I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream…
Doctor of humility
Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm (2014) was that rare thing — a neurosurgeon showing his fallibility in public and…
High flyers
It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their…
Whimsical digressions
The practical difficulties of extracting keys from the pockets of tight-fitting trousers while ascending stairs; the logistical hazards of seducing…
Size matters
Trust scientists to ruin all our fun. The spectacularly beautiful 2014 film reboot of Godzilla, it turns out, is anatomically…
Worthy, but wordy
Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit…
Vice guys
In 1981, an FBI team visited Donald Trump to discuss his plans for a casino in Atlantic City. Trump admitted…
Fad fury
Anthony Warner is angry. He’s angry about diets. He’s angry about detoxes. He’s angry about pseudoscience — and he has…
Two dark tales
Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed…
The appeal of mysticism
This extraordinary book has two main characters: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), an early Zionist and the founder of the modern study…
A choice of first novels
Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen…
Life classes
It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of…
Damage limitation
One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…
Verse and worse
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…
The disgrace of the British left
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…
Blood and bling
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…
The evil that men do
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…
Do we give a hoot?
‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between…
She-devils on horseback
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…
Another gone girl
Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in…
Borne back ceaselessly into the past
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936.…
Patience on a monument
As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the…
The greatest survival story
This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…
A policeman’s lot
Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’,…
A barren prospect
In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife,…
