Books

A modern witch-hunt

4 March 2023 9:00 am

For centuries, elderly women have been scorned as crones, hags and scolds – but it’s not only men who are belittling them now, says Victoria Smith

A radical new theory about the origin of the universe may help explain our existence

4 March 2023 9:00 am

Alexander Masters examines the top down cosmology proposed by Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog

Dismantling the Aboriginal industry

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Integration into a wider society works. That is why Australia is one of the most successful countries on the planet.…

Sisters in arms

25 February 2023 9:00 am

‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because’, said the American writer Josephine Herbst – just one of the sisterhood to become immersed in the struggle

Poetry anthologies to treasure

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Single volumes that fitted in a knapsack sustained many soldiers in the world wars, and have inspired countless schoolchildren to learn poems by heart

Why is Ukraine honouring the monsters of the past?

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Bernard Wasserstein describes the dreadful fate of Jews in Krakowiec in the 1940s – and is astonished that a statue has been erected there to one of their chief persecutors

Living trees that predate the dinosaurs

25 February 2023 9:00 am

The lifespans of cedars, oaks and yews are remarkable enough, but they pale in comparison to America’s bristlecone pines

Heroes and villeins

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Chaucer’s motley crew help to encapsulate the richness and diversity of the late-medieval world and its growing literacy, says Ian Mortimer

The impossible subject

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Two respected family men are each burdened by an unacceptable private life, in a debut novel based on the experiences of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis

Opposites attract

25 February 2023 9:00 am

A young guerrilla gardener and an American billionaire vie for a plot of land in New Zealand. Can they trust one another to reach an agreement?

Why are women composers still disregarded?

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Leah Broad celebrates four pioneering musicians who battled male prejudice throughout the past century – yet the situation remains stubbornly unchanged

Strange noises from upstairs

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Trapped abroad during lockdown, a lackadaisical reviewer is spurred to investigate the mysterious noises coming from the floor above his hotel suite

‘It felt like a piece of bad news I should pass on to someone else’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on his MS diagnosis

25 February 2023 9:00 am

In a powerful and ultimately heartening memoir, the Oxford professor describes being trapped in a mutinous body, and what it does to the spirit

The world has become a toxic prison – and a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Our own actions have created the toxic prison in which we now live, says Peter Frankopan, and the future looks terrifying. Adam Nicolson can only agree

Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed

The triumphs and disasters of 1845

18 February 2023 9:00 am

It was a year packed with drama – from the transatlantic crossing of the SS Great Britain to the start of the Irish potato blight that would leave millions starving

Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away

Man of many parts

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces

What’s to become of Wales?

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Exploring stretches of the country’s Roman road, Tom Bullough notes how climate change and environmental degradation are seriously threatening the landscape

The indomitable Pamela Anderson sees the best in everything

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity

A Caribbean mystery

18 February 2023 9:00 am

When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous

Doctor in despair

18 February 2023 9:00 am

A surgeon from Kashmir is tormented by the penal operations he once performed under Sharia law, such as amputations for robbery

Failing to denigrate Britain’s entire colonial record has become a heinous crime

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows

The death of popular music in Cambodia

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The vast majority of musicians who adopted 1960s rock and roll were later reviled by the Khmer Rouge and consigned to the Killing Fields, says Dee Payok

What, if anything, unites Asia as a continent?

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Is it merely a European construct – and what, if anything, do its diverse peoples have in common, wonders Peter Frankopan