Books
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…
Why should advocating sexual restraint be ridiculed?
Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’…
The great breakfast dilemma: should baked beans be part of a full English?
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…
Putin’s mistake was to discard the velvet glove
To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature…
All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
Is Gone with the Wind to blame for Trumpism?
Selfish, acquisitive, ignorant and vain, Gone with the Wind’s heroine not only resembles Donald Trump – she may even be his role model, says Greg Garrett
How inoculation against smallpox became all the rage in Russia
The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book…
At last, a book about James Joyce that makes you laugh
I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I…
Dangerous liaisons: Bad Eminence, by James Greer, reviewed
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…
