Books
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
Nicky Haslam: my two absolutely fabulous girlfriends
Many years ago, working on a project in Tel Aviv, I had a meeting-free weekend. I know, I thought, I’ll…
For fashionable Victorian travellers, the only way was Norway
‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…
Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces
Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…
A good man at the 1970s BBC
When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and…
When mother killed the plumber — and Nellie Melba came round to sing
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Do myths and folklore damage children’s brains?
Children’s fantasy literature has never been just one thing. Animal fables, folk and fairy tales were not originally intended for…
Nostalgia and nihilism
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
James Duke of Monmouth: perhaps the best king we never had
In Pepys’s famous words, James, Duke of Monmouth was ‘the most skittish, leaping gallant that ever I saw, always in…
Le Clézio’s The Prospector: from tropical beaches to the trenches of the Somme
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
'Wicked old Paris of the Orient': a portrait of 1930s Shanghai
Here’s the Mandarin for ooh-la-la! As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive…
How Siddhartha Mukherjee gets it wrong on IQ, sexuality and epigenetics
A clear, accurate, up-to-date pop science book on genetics would have been most welcome, says Stuart Ritchie. Sadly, this isn’t it
Elegiac and exuberant: short stories from Philip Hensher and Helen Oyeyemi
Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a…
The dying days of the English country house
Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at…
Why Juan Villoro is the best football writer you've never heard of
Football, unlike cricket, has for the most part been ill served by its writers. For every Brian Glanville and Ian…
Crime pursues the crime writer
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection…
Going ape with boredom in captivity
King Kong, the story of a violently amorous gorilla, Me Cheeta, the autobiography of a slanderous Hollywood chimpanzee, and now…
Sexual tension and Siberian magic mushrooms
On her arrival in Russia in 1914, Gerty Freely finds it refreshingly liberal compared to her native Britain: here servants…
No place for sissies among the Bridge Ladies of Connecticut
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms:…
Sneers and jeers over Lears
In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts…
Breaking the commandments on Moses’s mountain
A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim…
Equipped for life with a copy of Thucydides
‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled…
Chaos among the commodes in Nina Stibbe’s old folks’ home
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
How The Satanic Verses failed to burn
This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…
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