Books
Secret treaties and games of cat and mouse: a choice of recent crime fiction
Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an…
Snakes alive! Playing cricket in Latin America
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather…
A divided city: the Big Three fall out in post-war Berlin
Adam Sisman describes the toxic atmosphere in Berlin after the end of the second world war
The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
Billy Wilder — the making of a great film director
Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment…
The scandal of OxyContin, the painkiller that caused untold pain
The Sacklers’ callous greed has unleashed a tsunami of pain, says Ian Birrell
Brightest of the Bright Young People: the rich, rackety life of Cecil Beaton
In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’…
A smart take on literary London: Dead Souls, by Sam Riviere, reviewed
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Robert Thompson’s memoir is worth reading for the ‘Fairport years’ alone
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I…
The difficulty of building heaven on Earth: why utopias usually fail
The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict…
Mothers and daughters: I Couldn’t Love You More, by Esther Freud, reviewed
A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use…
Death by negligence: why did no one diagnose my sister’s TB?
In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45.…
Journey to the Moon: The Things We’ve Seen, by Agustín Fernández Mallo, reviewed
‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing…
How a small Mediterranean island determined the outcome of the second world war
If you can tell the difference between Jack Hawkins and John Mills, and between a Stuka and a Sten gun,…
The road to firebombing Tokyo was paved with good intentions
In the 1930s, a group of American airmen had a dream. Air power, they believed, would do away with the…
It’s time the British faced some uncomfortable truths, says Matthew d’Ancona
As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and…
Orcadian cadences: celebrating the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown
Maggie Fergusson on the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown
A mighty contest from trivial things — the quarrel between Alexander Pope and Edmund Curll
Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak…
It takes a trained ear fully to appreciate Indian music
At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to…
The defiance of the ‘ghetto girls’ who resisted the Nazis
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…
A Danubian Narnia: Nostalgia, by Mircea Cartarescu, reviewed
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…
And then there were five: The High House, by Jessie Greengrass, reviewed
In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like…
What happens next? Gauging the fallout from the pandemic
What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there…
An orange or an egg? Determining the shape of the world
Simon Winchester follows the volatile French mission to Ecuador in 1735 to determine the shape of the Earth
Waiting for Gödel is over: the reclusive genius emerges from the shadows
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
