Books
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…
Land of Second Chances, by Tim Lewis - review
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about…
Waiting for the Train
Early spring cherry blossom by the tracks — so prim and so dirty, all at once. The bees must be…
