Books
Soaring and singing
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature…
Love under wraps
It’s an important subject: the existence of a permanent and significant minority within London’s life. Gay men and lesbians have…
Deeply mysterious
The human urge for personal hygiene has had many improbable side-effects, and I can confidently assert that through the ages,…
The books the Nazis didn’t burn
For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking…
Signs and spellsnich
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He…
Flee or die
Every nation has the right to control its borders, but we in the West are getting a bit too comfortable…
Ripping yarns
In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just…
Pets in the Blitz
War Horse, by way of book and play and film, has brought the role of horses in war into the…
A great awakening
One afternoon in August 1978, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan were flying from Beijing to Shanghai. They were on the…
When will we ever learn?
In 2012, sugar became more dangerous than gunpowder. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, of the 56 million people…
On the trail of a lost masterpiece
On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a…
Cinderella in China
She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of…
Climb trees and grow a beard
A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he…
Suspension of disbelief
The history of modern medicine is a roll call of brilliant minds making breakthrough discoveries. We rarely hear about the…
In a dark forest
In his mid-forties Will Ashon realised he was adrift and confused, confronted by the situation Dante described in the Divine…
Burning issues
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is…
Appointment with death
It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles…
The fearful forties
In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the…
A husband to die for
What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories…
The wondrous cross
How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image…
Europe’s best hope
Go into any high street bookshop and find the European history section. There’s usually a shelf or two on France…
Dark secrets of village life
Jon McGregor’s first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise inclusion on the 2002 Booker longlist that went…
The gangster life of Ryan
Lisa McInerney found a brilliant way to turn heads and hone her craft as the ‘Sweary Lady’ behind the ‘Arse…
A cuckold’s revenge
Perhaps the least necessary piece of advice ever given to a Hanif Kureishi protagonist comes in 2014’s The Last Word.…
America’s other civil war
‘What makes the Red Man red?’ the Lost Boys asked in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). According to Sammy Cahn’s lyric,…
