Books
Approaching America
Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly…
Approaching America
Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly…
Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
The King Kong of the thriller: the phenomenal output of Edgar Wallace, once the world’s most popular author
At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of…
Persuasions
Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…
The Nightwatches of Bonaventura: a masterpiece of German Gothic
In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement was in full swing across Europe. You could probably date its birth…
The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?
In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh…
A state of terror: Islamic State longs to be left alone to establish its blood-stained utopia
The Sykes-Picot agreement will be 100 years old next year, but there will be no congratulatory telegrams winging their way…
Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed
Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near,…
Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End
This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie…
Books and arts
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Persuasions
Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…
Persuasions
Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind
Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism
David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man
This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends…
Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…
Lurid & Cute is too true to its title
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…
Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex
What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…
Refugees and resilience: a story of Africa
I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected…
Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist
Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian…
A ghost story without the scary bits
Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress,…
The best new crime novels (and a rule for enjoying them)
I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written…
The real mystery is how it got published
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…
Making physics history
The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want…
