Books
A glimpse of lost London – before the yuppie invasion
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…
War between Heaven and Hell: The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox, reviewed
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
First love: The Inseparables, by Simone de Beauvoir, reviewed
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
The cosmopolitan spirit of the Middle East vanished with the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
The great disrupter: how William of Occam overturned medieval thought
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Should the Duke of Windsor have been tried for treason?
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Are the English exceptionally gullible?
The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a…
The history of transplants had many false starts
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much…
Glasgow gangsters: 1979, by Val McDermid, reviewed
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
W.G. Sebald’s borrowed truths and barefaced lies
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
Hooray for Hollywood
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it.…
The poet with many lives
This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the…
Keeping yourself angry, the Hare way: We Travelled, by David Hare, reviewed
A character in David Hare’s Skylight claims she has at last found contentment by no longer opening newspapers or watching…
Oliver Cromwell: ruthless in battle – but nice to his men
One of the first retrospective accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s early career, Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from…
How we did the locomotion: A Brief History of Motion, by Tom Standage, reviewed
Audi will make no more fuel engines after 2035. So that’s the end of the Age of Combustion, signalled by…
The roots of conflict: The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
The Island of Missing Trees feels like a strange title until you realise how hard Elif Shafak makes trees work…
David Keenan, literary disruptor in chief
Near to the heart of this wild and labyrinthine novel — on page 516 of 808 — a character in…
Churchill as villain – but is this a character assassination too far?
Revisionist biographies of Churchill are nothing new but this one lays the hostility and contempt on with a trowel, says Andrew Roberts
Nazis and Nordics: the latest crime fiction reviewed
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
