Books
Chronicle of a death foretold
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
In deep water
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
More Russian escapism
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
Journey to selfhood
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Making scientific history
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
Musical misfits
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Foreign corners that are forever England
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Nasser and the Nazis
Justin Marozzi finds Egypt teeming with Germans after the second world war
Harping on the past
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
Half blind to the world
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
A very Irish tragedy
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
Riding the feedless horse
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dark days in Hollywood
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Mystic multitudes
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
Alfred the Great
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
This other Eden
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Trump’s legal eagle is candid
There may have been irregularities in the processing and counting of ballots that warranted official investigation
How to see off the grumps
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
