Books
Island, by J. Edward Chamberlin - review
‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in…
A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell - review
Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me…
The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic, by Henry Buckley - review
With Spain’s economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of…
A Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing - review
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper - review
This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…
Holy Orders, by Benjamin Black - review
It’s always a little disconcerting for the rest of us when literary novelists turn to crime. Have they become different…
Country Boy, by Richard Hillyer - review
Under his real name, Charles James Stranks, the author of this little masterpiece wrote on a number of ecclesiastical subjects:…
Books and Arts
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Glorious Misadventures, by Owen Mathews - review
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says Sam Leith
Empire of the Deep, by Ben Wilson - review
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
The Son, by Philipp Meyer - review
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
The Ghosts of Happy Valley, by Juliet Barnes - review
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
A Slap in the Face, by William B. irvine - review
A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to…
Magic, by Ricky Jay - review
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Shire, by Ali Smith - review
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
Birds & People, by Mark Cocker - review
‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow…
Books and Arts
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In the bunker
The rusted-on supporters of the ALP must wonder how it came to this. Six years ago, the ALP was on…
Books and arts
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Edwardian Opulence, edited by Angus Trumble - review
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Wreaking, by James Scudamore - review
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
The Breath of Night, by Michael Arditti
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
Looking at Books by John Sutherland - essay
The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two…
Niccolo Machiavelli, by Corrado Vivanti; The Garments of Court and Palace, by Philip Bobbitt
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein - review
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
