Books
A fable for our times
When phylloxera destroys the vines on the Aoelian island of ‘S’, the inhabitants, forced to emigrate, blame the recently established prison colony
Who would be a farmer’s wife?
‘Some days I feel like I’m drowning,’ admits Helen Rebanks, caught between cooking, housework, admin, tagging lambs and the school run at the Lake District family farm
Cheerful meanderings: Caret, by Adam Mars-Jones, reviewed
Now established in Cambridge, John Cromer embarks on a whirlwind of small adventures, testing our patience, if not our sympathy, with his extensive digressions
Sticky, slithery, squelchy, smacky: the authentic Chinese food experience
Fuchsia Dunlop enjoys a rich variety of dishes throughout China, including drunken hairy crabs, crisp pig’s ears, giant carp’s tails and delicate ducks’ tongues
Why were 80,000 Asians suddenly expelled from Uganda in 1972?
Lucy Fulford never fully explains how this community was so easily scapegoated, nor why Idi Amin’s decree caused such jubilation across East Africa at the time
The Hundred Years War ends in England’s agonising defeat – but triumph for Jonathan Sumption
England’s final, agonising defeat in the Hundred Years War brings Jonathan Sumption’s monumental history to a close. David Crane salutes 43 years of research and writing
Magic tricks
Five short stories with male narrators – including a seahorse and a vampire – revolve around masculinity’s contradictory demands and the wish to belong
Tangled threads
The painted-over figure of Baudelaire’s muse eventually emerging from Courbet’s great canvas provides one of many haunting images in this complex novel
The man who loves volcanoes
Clive Oppenheimer feels a deep kinship with the many volcanoes he has studied. When he is airlifted from Mount Erebus, he suffers ‘the heartache of leaving a lover’
The ‘historic’ national dishes which turn out to be artful PR exercises
Japan’s ramen ‘tradition’ was created in 1958 to use up surplus imported flour, while Pizza Margherita’s specious royal connection helped boost Naples’s tourist trade
Would we welcome bears in Britain again?
With rewilding projects multiplying worldwide, brown, black and grizzly bears are making a bold comeback. But how much bear can we bear?
Dickens’s London is more elusive than the artful dodger himself
Admirers of the novels have always enjoyed identifying their settings where possible, but Dickens’s old haunts are now mainly glimpsed in street names or blue plaques
A trail of dirty money
In 2015, a dedicated DEA agent pursues a Mafia capo involved in a vast cocaine shipment, a Hezbollah militia leader and an elaborate Middle Eastern arms-trafficking ring
Complicated and slightly creepy: the Bogart-Bacall romance
Lauren Bacall was 25 years younger than Humphrey Bogart. Unlike his previous wives, she stayed – though Roger Lewis finds something creepy about their relationship
Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge
The decolonisers in Britain’s universities are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them, says Doug Stokes
Violence in the Valley
When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of one the ‘greenest, quietest, safest’ places in America is shattered
Going for broke
The founding member of the Small Faces was playing an instrument from the age of six, but was forever haunted by the fear of MS, the inherited disease which eventually killed him
Russia’s long history of smears, sabotage and barefaced lies
Mark Hollingsworth describes how the KGB became the world’s most industrious conspiracy-theory factory, with its agents of influence dedicated to sowing maximum confusion
Tales of the Midwest: The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard, reviewed
Violence and death are balanced by hard-won, transcendent joy in Beard’s remarkable stories that merge fiction and memoir
The illiterate poet who produced the world’s greatest epic
With its carefully calibrated sense of time, the Iliad is clearly the work of a single man and not a ‘rolling snowball’ of different contributions, argues Robin Lane Fox
How the barbarians of the steppes shaped civilisation
The nomadic tribes of Central Asia eventually created vast empires that changed not only their own world but western history, says Kenneth W. Harl
Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?
Grotesque conspiracy theories merge and snowball, with serious global consequences. James Ball proposes a Digital Health System to counter the ‘pathogens’
Other worlds, other lives
A scientist finds a way to access other realities and bequeaths the secret to her daughter. But a dangerous adversary is on the trail
The waking nightmare
After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath
Ghostly grandeur
The history of the magnificent Thames-side palace, with its outrageous shenanigans spanning five centuries, is vividly brought to life by Gareth Russell
