Books
Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
A gay journey of self-discovery
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
In praise of burning pianos
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Must we now despise colonial architecture too?
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
The Nazi influence in Egypt
Justin Marozzi finds Egypt teeming with Germans after the second world war
These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
Who planned Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s murder?
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage: On Java Road, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history: Ancestry, by Simon Mawer, reviewed
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dark days in Hollywood: Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra, reviewed
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
The sad, extraordinary life of Basil Bunting
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
Homage to Sydney Kentridge, South Africa’s courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Behind the Five Eyes intelligence alliance
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
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…
