Books
Why autocracy in Russia always fails in the end
Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s…
My father, the tyrant: Robert Edric describes a brutal upbringing
In a career stretching back to the mid-1980s, Robert Edric has so far managed a grand total of 28 novels,…
Ghosts in a landscape: farming life through the eyes of Thomas Hennell
Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of…
‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal
It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji…
In the land of the blind
Somehow, American culture has got itself into a terrible mess of division and acrimony: elites against mainstream, progressives against conservatives,…
Savage aperçus: Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler, reviewed
Lauren Oyler is viral and vicious. A critic with a reputation for pulling no punches, she is known for delivering…
Algeria’s War of Independence still leaves festering wounds, two new novels reveal
In France, even the car horns yelled about Algeria. A five-beat klaxon blast — three short, two long — signalled…
All good friends and jolly good company: life with the Crichel Boys
In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…
Labour of love: producing the perfect loaf
Wheat flour, and the bread made from it, has been a recurring cause of concern for the British for centuries,…
Hellcat on the loose: Samantha Markle rants about Meghan
A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was…
Joan Didion’s needle-sharp eye never fails
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
Up close and personal: voices from the Great War, week by week
As the Great War unfolds, voices we don’t usually hear describe with a terrible raw honesty the realities of their experience, says David Crane
In the trenches
I can hardly recall a more engaging and uplifting biography than this life of Major-General William Holmes, who was killed…
A Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy in Uttar Pradesh
In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches…
Gabriel Matzneff: the paedophile who hid in plain sight
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
The stuff of fiction: Elizabeth Bowen exploits her extra-marital affairs
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
The true diplomat considers the future more than the present
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
CIA spies lose faith
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
A complex creation myth: Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth, reviewed
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Reality and online life clash: No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood, reviewed
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and…
Geology’s dry, rocky road
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
When poison is the cure: examining today’s processed meat
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was…
On the track of a mysterious recluse: Maxwell’s Demon, by Steven Hall, reviewed
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
What does ownership of land really mean?
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…
Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomised
Caspar Henderson 6 March 2021 9:00 am
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to…