Books
The lost world of the Karoo
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
What has become of the 19th-century explosion of religiosity?
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
Lord Northcliffe’s war of words
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
Is self-loathing the British disease?
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Trump’s legal eagle is candid
There may have been irregularities in the processing and counting of ballots that warranted official investigation
When did cheerfulness get so miserable?
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
A frictionless history of fieldwork: In Search of Us reviewed
To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…
The well of happiness – and despair: Queer St Ives reviewed
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
The Everybody Inn: what happened when a hotel opened its doors to the homeless?
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
The folly of garden cities
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
A child’s-eye view of the not-so-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
The sweet and sour sides of growing up in a Chinese takeaway
Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they…
The impossibility of separating Scotland from Britain
A ‘global’ history of Scotland must, by its very nature, be one of Britain and Empire too, says Alex Massie
An authentic portrait of gay love in small-town Britain: The Whale Tattoo reviewed
In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set…
A call to farms: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood.…
Plain tales of crookedness and corruption: Rogues reviewed
Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel,…
The forgotten heroines of the Middle Ages
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s…
Spikes and stagnant growth: why we are where we are
We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and…
Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po
It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length…
Reclaiming the siege of Leningrad from the Russian state: Living Pictures reviewed
Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts…
What is the metaverse, actually?
Big tech might tell us it’s what’s coming next but as yet there’s no real use for it, says James Ball
‘Jerusalem’ is a rousing anthem – but who knows what the words mean?
‘Jerusalem’ may be our unofficial national anthem, but don’t ask anyone who sings it to tell you what it means, says Philip Hensher
Naples will never escape the shadow of Vesuvius
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Hysterical outbursts: Bewitched, by Jill Dawson, reviewed
‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go…
The wonder of the wandering life
Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…
