Books
Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
Mind games: the blurred line between fact and fiction
Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal.…
Paradise and paradox: an inner pilgrimage into John Milton
When E. Nesbit published Wet Magic in 1913 (a charming novel in which the children encounter a mermaid), she took…
Wrapped up in satire, a serious lesson about the fine line between success and scandal
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
A 21st-century Holden Caulfield: The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozecki, reviewed
The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop…
The coal mining conundrum: why did the NUM fight so hard for its members’ right to suffer underground?
Anyone with a grasp of the history of Britain knows that its once considerable power, and much of its still…
Flight into danger: Freight Dogs, by Giles Foden, reviewed
Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to…
China and the WHO are given an easy ride in the Covid blame game
Are you ready to relive 2020? That’s what Adam Tooze is offering as he tells the story of Covid-19 through…
The first patrons of Modernism deserve much sympathy and respect
If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and…
From salivating dogs to mass indoctrination: Pavlov’s sinister legacy
Peter Pomeranzev describes the refinement of thought-control techniques over the past century – and the worldwide competition to employ them
T.S. Eliot’s preoccupations in wartime Britain
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
Thoroughly modern Marie: Matrix, by Lauren Groff, reviewed
It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court…
The war that changed the world in the early seventh century
It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…
Only Iain Sinclair could glimpse Hackney in the wilds of Peru
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
How China’s economic revolution created billionaires overnight
In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited…
No Samuel Beckett play is set in stone
It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the…
The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
Is there intelligent life on other planets?: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, reviewed
We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this…
Try forest bathing – by day and night – to ward off depression
Anyone who spends time among trees senses how good that is for their physical and mental wellbeing, says Ursula Buchan
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
James Bond and the Beatles herald a new Britain
The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old…
All great fun: Mary Churchill dances through the war
The famous photographic portrait by Karsh of Winston Churchill as wartime prime minster personifies heroic defiance and grim determination. His…
Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Irish quartet: Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney, reviewed
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
Ahmad Shah Massoud was Afghanistan’s best hope
Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated…
