Books
Bittersweet memories: Ti Amo, by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
Second chances: The Marble Staircase, by Elizabeth Fair, reviewed
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
Why Tate Modern seems more like a playground than an art gallery
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…
Pre-Mussolini, most Italians couldn’t understand each other
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again
Every country has an origin story but nonehas ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject…
The nondescript house that determined the outcome of the second world war
Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of…
Wall Street madness: Trust, by Hernan Diaz, reviewed
‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too…
A dying doctor’s last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
Sixteen cathedrals to see before you die
There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life…
In praise of Birmingham, Britain’s maligned second city
During my gap year in 1981, I worked on the 24th floor of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower for the Regional Manpower…
The visionary genius of Harold Wilson
‘Our generation owes an apology to the shades of Harold Wilson,’ the polling guru Peter Kellner once told me. Had…
A lost brother: My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, by Paul Stanbridge, reviewed
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
Nazi on the run: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, by Olivier Guez, reviewed
Who would have thought that someone would write a novel about Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor and infamous experimenter on…
How to snare your reader: the secret of a good blurb
It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read…
The short-lived wonder of Creedence Clearwater Revival
Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…
Murder most foul: The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
In the footsteps of the Romantic poets
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
Courage on the high seas
The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the…
How the quarrelsome ‘Jena set’ paved the way for Hitler
Frances Wilson describes a group of self-obsessed intellectuals united by mutual loathing in a small university town in the 1790s
Aleister Crowley was even more beastly than we’d imagined
I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…
Cosy crime flourishes in the pick of the summer’s thrillers
Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like…
The diary of a tortured man: Deceit, by Yuri Felsen, reviewed
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Rocked by rebellion: the short, unhappy reign of Edward VI
As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…
Joy, fear and regret in contemporary Britain
For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes,…
Harpo Marx – genius, idiot savant or lovable overgrown child?
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
