Books
Scholars and spectres: The Runes Have Been Cast, by Robert Irwin, reviewed
It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being…
A late fling: Free Love, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
Variations on a theme: To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara, reviewed
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
The march of the larch: the Treeline is now encroaching on the arctic tundra
Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land.…
Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
The first fairy stories were never intended for children
Philip Hensher explores the origins of fairy tales
Who’s in, who’s out?
From Ladybird’s The Story of Music (a dinky 50 pages, generously illustrated) to Richard Taruskin’s five-volume epic The Oxford History…
Timely tales of pestilence
Professor David Damrosch, the director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, fell in love with ‘a fictional realm that I’d…
Feathered friends
Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and…
Shades of grey
In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of…
A double thriller
‘Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’ The much quoted words of Rodion Raskolnikov, the…
Unlucky in love
James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more…
Anything for a laugh
‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in…
The modern pantheon
In January 1780 the news reached London that Captain Cook had been killed and eaten in Hawaii. The story of…
The translator’s art
‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’ Despite appearing in Essays Two, the…
The year of living dangerously
Atrocities, assassinations and spectacular accidents were just some of the horrors that marked 1922, says Richard Davenport-Hines
Summer books
2021: grit your teeth and read a good book
Were the Sixties really so liberated?
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s
Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…
Don’t be seduced by fake truffle oil this Christmas
Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…
Why America’s attitude to mental illness is dangerously deluded
A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got…
Jan Morris’s last book is a vade mecum to treasure
Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As…
Spot the book title 2021
For answers, click here Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
All successful spies need to be good actors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
Dancing on Terence Conran’s grave
‘Who,’ asks Stephen Bayley, in one of the ‘S.B’ chapters of this irresistibly spiky co-written book, ‘could countenance working for…
