Books
Is Serena Williams’s fame as a cultural icon eclipsing her tennis?
Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but…
Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
Oh! Calcutta! Amartya Sen’s childhood memories brim with nostalgia
From Bengali schoolboy to citizen of the world – Amartya Sen’s autobiography is a joy, says Philip Hensher
Australian art in the Roaring Twenties
The only criticism that can be levelled at For the Fallen by Paul Paffen is that it lacks the hard…
Not so dryasdust: how 18th-century antiquarians proved the first ‘modern’ historians
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Leni Riefenstahl is missing: The Dictator’s Muse, by Nigel Farndale, reviewed
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
A lesson in understanding serial killers and child molesters
True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the…
Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
The strangest landscapes are close to home
This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so…
Sweet and sour: Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
We’ve embraced William Blake without having any idea of what he was on about
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
The short, unhappy life of Ivor Gurney — wounded, gassed and driven insane
Andrew Motion describes the inner turmoil of the neglected poet Ivor Gurney
A load of oddballs: the eccentricities of past cricketing heroes
For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a…
Journey to the end of the world: the full horror of the Belgica’s Antarctic expedition
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure:…
Justice betrayed
It was always an inherently implausible accusation: that Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate had sexually assaulted choir boys after Mass…
In search of Great-Aunt Pearl’s will: a black comedy of familial strife
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
The sexploits of Mariella Novotny
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
How William Hogarth made Britain
A new biography of William Hogarth pays dutiful homage to his satirical genius but does not challenge its predecessors, writes Philip Hensher
Pure, white and native: the birch as a symbol of Russian nationalism
The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…
A hymn to the hummingbird — one of the most astonishing organisms on Earth
Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful…
O father, where art thou? Fox Fires, by Wyl Menmuir, reviewed
Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for…
