Books
The war on drugs is stupid and counter-productive
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Books & arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Steyin’ alive
What are the odds that one of the world’s best political commentators happens to be an expert on the songs…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
The harsh, lonely lives of Kenya’s astonishingly gifted runners
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their…
The Outsider — from the viewpoint of the victim’s family
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
The best Jeeves and Wooster novel Saul Bellow never wrote
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece — they go back at least to the Peloponnesian War
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
Fishy women: the mermaid in folklore, art and literature
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?
A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s…
Dennis Potter: one of the last great masters of vituperation
‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…
Where are the green silk blinds of the once luxurious Metropolitan Line?
Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding.…
Books and arts opener
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
The sadist who wrecked New York, and the last of the great biographers
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
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
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
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
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
