Books
Doctor who?
On 25 July 1865, during a heatwave, Dr James Barry died of dysentery in his London lodgings. A charwoman came…
No happy endings
Between agreeing to review this book and receiving it, I got worried. Like many, I adore Doctor Zhivago with its…
Gale-force lyricism
Centuries before their footballers learned giant-slaying ways, Icelanders knew how to startle the world with tall stories. In the moonscape…
All about C
In March 1981 Margaret Thatcher went to the hospital bedside of Maurice Oldfield, the former head of the Secret Intelligence…
The Capability controversy
In a piece of light verse from the 1770s ‘Dame Nature’ — out strolling ‘one bright day’ — bumps into…
White trash
Hillbilly Elegy is an extended meditation on cultural and social capital. It asks seriously – and answers truthfully – this…
Seeing red
Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809: Every rope…
An age-old problem
With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor…
Part sermon, part crossword puzzle
The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel…
Playing for high stakes
Now that even candidates for President of the United States can rise up from the undead dregs of reality television,…
Agents of enterprise
A teenager in the second decade of the Cold War, my father was taught to play snooker by a KGB…
The original and the copyist
Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes…
Ways out of recovery
Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like…
The age of accusation
Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of…
To zyxst and back again
What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task…
The power of music and storytelling
Madeleine Thien’s third novel, recently long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, begins in Vancouver with Marie, who, like the author,…
A meeting of two minds
This lovely, modest and precise book tells the story of the most productive friendship among the modernists, and the most…
Is there anybody out there?
Fifty years ago this summer, a new show appeared on American TV screens. These, the opening titles explained, were the…
Preaching in pictures
To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy…
Desperate liaison
Six years ago, the Canadian author Clancy Martin made a splash with his autobiographical novel How to Sell, based on…
The axeman cometh
All organic beings descended from a single primordial blob, according to Darwin. Some of them developed sufficiently to leave the…
The horrors of French colonialism
We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’…
Trees of life and death
Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his…
Long lives the King
Elvis only ever appeared in one commercial in his life — for Southern Maid, his favourite jam doughnut shop. That…
They’re all doomed
Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s first novel for 14 years. For most of us he is better known as…
