Books
The magic of bookshops
It is not uncommon for writers to be obsessed by bookshops. Some even find their writing feet through loving a…
Bolsheviks on board
Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it…
More sinned against than sinning
The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in…
The spell of the pharaohs
Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile,…
Jolly good fellows
‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the…
Smoke and mirrors
Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds…
Nazis and narcotics
Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the…
Lessons in sex
Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is…
Cocktails, castles and cadging
Here is a veritable feast for fans of Paddy Leigh Fermor. This is the story of a well-lived life through…
The art of listening
Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in…
All work, many plays
‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little…
Knight’s tale
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in…
Frankly impenetrable
One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free,…
Recent crime fiction
There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy…
The fallen Angel
Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who…
Untold tales of Tibet
On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer…
Body and soul
Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired…
The curse of Mr Kurtz
Marie Darrieussecq shot to literary fame in France when her bestselling debut, Pig Tales (1996), was a finalist for the…
The quiet patriot
History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental…
Thinking of Israel
‘Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960,’ announces the…
The Crusades live
The 12th-century crusader Reynald de Chatillon was one of the most controversial men of his time, and his new biographer…
When less is more
It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before…
Who you think you are
The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays about black and ethnic minority experience and identity in Britain today, is inconsistent,…
What makes Turkey tick
I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental…
War games
For a long time the Australian military has been very wary about public discussions, so this first book is a…
