Books
The nightmare continues
The Cultural Revolution may have been officially forgotten, but it will always haunt Xinran and her generation
Travelling hopefully
Sam Miller challenges the ‘myth of sedentarism’, arguing that mankind is naturally nomadic and that an itinerant life is anyway good for us
Three Dublin families
Characters ruminate, doors are shut and relationships falter as one person’s thoughts grate on another’s in these subtle, tightly-knit stories
Frank and fearless
Leaving poetry aside, his memoir covers insanity, debt, drugs, narcissism, religious mania and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored
Where the wild things are
The Mesta region of Bulgaria, where the river meets the forests of the western Rhodope range, remains remarkably intact and rich in wild harvests
The long and the short of it
There are many vagaries about measurements, says Claire Cock-Starkey: the length of the foot has often changed, but British shoe sizes hark back to the reign of Edward II
Expelled from paradise
A mixed-race family living in an island paradise off the coast of Maine are made painfully aware that their days are numbered
Make an early start
Shinichi Suzuki certainly believed that learning music is like learning a language, and to be ‘fluent’ in an instrument merely depends on starting early enough
The mock king of Madagascar
David Graeber imagines the 17th-century buccaneer establishing an enlightened kingdom in the Indian Ocean where all goods were held in common
Loved and lost
The third act of Morrison’s family saga focuses on Gill, the once loving and generous sister he was so close to but was unable to save
Voice of reason
Governments and the woke elite are falling over themselves with taxpayer and shareholder money to promote the seriously dangerous proposal…
Has Salman Rushdie become his own pastiche?
Salman Rushdie returns to India with a full-throated mix of history, magic realism and dazzling storytelling, says James Walton
Cosmo Landesman has no time for feel-good-grief memoirs
The heartbroken father endlessly relives his son’s suicide, raking over every moment of Jack’s battle with depression and drug addiction
The vexing problem of ancient Greek mathematics
Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes viewed mathematics in a very different way to us, but Reviel Netz helps us glimpse the minds of antiquity’s great thinkers
Cold-blooded murder in Amazonia
Criminal syndicates, corrupt officials and faceless assassins now control the increasingly depleted rainforest, killing or enslaving all who stand in their way
The stone boats of Celtic saints inspire a bizarre pilgrimage
In homage to St Magnus, the stonemason Beatrice Searle carries a heavy load from Orkney to Trondheim, following an ancient pilgrims’ way
The lost world of Jewish Rhodes
Stella Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, recalls the vibrant, long-established Jewish community that existed in the Dodecanese before the Nazi deportations in 1944
Nursing grievances in the Crimean War
When Florence Nightingale was joined in Scutari by groups of volunteer nuns, tensions among them soon imperilled the entire female nursing experiment
How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy
In 1993, Natasha Lance Rogoff was tasked with introducing the American puppets to Russia in the hope of cultivating peace, love and understanding
The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s thrilling mission to save the lives of 6,500 Jews and Allied soldiers in Nazi-occupied Rome doesn’t quite get the memorial it deserves
Butchered to make a Roman holiday: cruelty to animals in and out of the Colosseum
Brutality might be expected of a people who fed each other to lions – but it extended even to the elephants the Romans regarded as soulmates
A playful provocateur
The world-class musician describes his early desire to shock, his delight in the sensual, his life-changing relationship with Catholicism and, finally, his debut at Carnegie Hall
A bleak vision of adolescence: The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed
A group of privileged teenagers at Buckley School, Los Angeles medicate themselves on champagne, cocaine and mindless sex – until something awful happens
If Lady Mendl didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent her
The flamboyant hostess and ‘psychic’ interior decorator does seem like a comic creation – but she was real enough, and perhaps madder than Ludwig Bemelmans lets on
What the Wife of Bath teaches us about misogyny
The lovable rounded character of The Canterbury Tales has been ridiculed over the centuries for her sexual appetites, completely subverting Chaucer’s focus
