Books

The war on drugs is stupid and counter-productive

18 July 2015 9:00 am

Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…

Growing Up

18 July 2015 9:00 am

This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…

‘Interior of Salisbury Cathedral, Looking Towards the North Transept’, c.1801–5, by J.M.W. Turner

Books & arts

18 July 2015 9:00 am

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Steyin’ alive

18 July 2015 9:00 am

What are the odds that one of the world’s best political commentators happens to be an expert on the songs…

Growing Up

16 July 2015 1:00 pm

This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…

Growing Up

16 July 2015 1:00 pm

This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…

Boccaccio and Petrach

The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty

Author Ken Kalfus (Photo: Getty)

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…

Geoffrey Mutai leads the New York City marathon in November 2013

The harsh, lonely lives of Kenya’s astonishingly gifted runners

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their…

Kamal Daoud (Photo: Getty)

The Outsider — from the viewpoint of the victim’s family

11 July 2015 9:00 am

In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…

Jonathan Ames (Photo: Getty)

The best Jeeves and Wooster novel Saul Bellow never wrote

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…

Athenian general Xenophon

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece — they go back at least to the Peloponnesian War

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…

Epitaph for a Star

11 July 2015 9:00 am

A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…

‘Working Boats from around the British Coast’: mural with mermaids and a dancing lobster by the visionary artist Alan Sorrell, commissioned for the Festival of Britain, 1951

Fishy women: the mermaid in folklore, art and literature

11 July 2015 9:00 am

The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid,…

Has A.N. Wilson reached the last port of call on the tempestuous sea of faith?

11 July 2015 9:00 am

A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s…

Dennis Potter, 1978 (Photo: Getty)

Dennis Potter: one of the last great masters of vituperation

11 July 2015 9:00 am

‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…

‘Pleasures of a sea voyage’ from Three Men and a Bradshaw

Where are the green silk blinds of the once luxurious Metropolitan Line?

11 July 2015 9:00 am

Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding.…

‘Friendship’, 1963, by Agnes Martin

Books and arts opener

11 July 2015 9:00 am

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Epitaph for a Star

9 July 2015 1:00 pm

A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…

Epitaph for a Star

9 July 2015 1:00 pm

A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…

Robert Moses in 1952

The sadist who wrecked New York, and the last of the great biographers

4 July 2015 9:00 am

John R. MacArthur on the bureaucratic titan who gratuitously bulldozed a great city and displaced and demoralised half a million of its inhabitants

The boy who rebuilt the sun on earth

4 July 2015 9:00 am

In 2008, when Taylor Wilson was 14, he created a working nuclear fusion reactor, ‘a miniature sun on earth’. At…

Copyright: the great rock’n’roll swindle

4 July 2015 9:00 am

For a music fan, the quiz question, ‘Who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?’ might seem laughably easy. Yet if…

The end of the world: an illustrated guide

4 July 2015 9:00 am

At the heart of the eschatological ideology of the Islamic State is the belief that when the world ends (and…

Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains

4 July 2015 9:00 am

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…