Books
Watcher of the skies: John Constable, painter and meteorologist
Philip Hensher describes how John Constable’s energy and imagination freed British art from the constraints of the past
Lonely voices: Dance Move, by Wendy Erskine, reviewed
‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this…
Know your left from your right: the brain’s divided hemispheres
The dust jacket of The Matter With Things quotes a large statement from an Oxford professor: ‘This is one of…
The best and coolest decade: nostalgia for the 1990s
The long 1990s began with the Pixies album Surfer Rosa in 1989 and ended with the invasion of Iraq in…
A Canadian’s experience of the migrant’s ordeal
No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant…
An innocent abroad: a Dutch tour operator in 1980s Russia
‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins TheLong Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if…
Don’t listen to Johann Hari to help your attention span
In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche made a complaint about the modern world, writing in The Gay Science: Even now one is…
Eugenics will never work — thankfully
The creation of a master race is an ancient idea which, thankfully, can never work, says Sam Leith
Abstract and concrete: the beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
Is Julian Assange on a hiding to nothing?
A question looms throughout this book: is it better to die rather than experience the wrath of a publicly shamed…
Both epic and intimate: The Love Songs of W.E. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, reviewed
To write a first novel of 800 pages is either supremely confident or crazy. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of…
Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
A modern Medea: Iron Curtain, by Vesna Goldsworthy, reviewed
Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the…
Stalin the intellectual: the dictator cast in a new light
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
At last, a literary sexy novel: Love Marriage, by Monica Ali, reviewed
At last, and finally: literary sex is back. The Bad Sex Prize has a lot to answer for in British…
Parallel lives: Violets, by Alex Hyde, reviewed
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
All hell breaks loose when our senses go haywire
Jesus is a Malteser. You might say I’m a liar or accuse me of the most egregious heresy, but the…
French Kiss-Off
For decades the purpose of British settlement in New South Wales seemed too obvious to question. The American War of…
Pre-crime has arrived in China
The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…
Scaling the heights: a woman’s experience of mountain climbing
In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales…
Smugglers’ gold: Winchelsea, by Alex Preston, reviewed
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
A guide to the apothecary’s garden
On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some…
The BBC is trapped in its own smug bubble
An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely…
Adapt or die: what the natural world can teach us about climate change
Climate change may be the central challenge of our century, but almost all attention has focused on its consequences for…
What did the Russians make of Francis Bacon?
The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what…
