Books
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising
‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty,…
Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure
Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so…
Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours
A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we…
James Kelman’s ‘Memoirs’ are a misnomer
James Kelman doubtless remains best known for his 1994 Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late and…
The serious business of graphic novels
One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…
Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family
If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
The tug of war over the Rosetta Stone
The decipherment of the Rosetta Stone led to bitter feuding – but there was mutual curiosity and collaboration too, says Elizabeth Frood
In the land of the blind
Carter William Page, born in 1971, is the former United States Navy officer with personal, business, scholarly and government connections…
Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?
The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.…
No one ‘got’ the Sixties better than David Bailey
What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer…
Bright and beautiful: the year’s best art books reviewed
When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ —…
The plight of the migrant: Crossed Lines, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed
‘We should be living in a brave country and on a brave planet that bravely distributes its occupants,’ thinks Rose…
The British Empire is now the subject on which the sun never sets
Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes…
Roy Strong’s towering egotism is really rather engaging
Stephen Bayley recalls his (mainly enjoyable) encounters with the flamboyant former museum director
Blame game
Ah, millennials. Golden children of the Digital Age or dysfunctional, over-educated slackers? Bit of both, says Anne Helen Petersen, although…
Is there anything left worth joking about?
Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One…
Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words
Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith
No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…
When sedition was rife in 18th-century London
Researching the seditious literature of earlier periods is seldom suspenseful, pulse-quickening work. For every thrill of archival discovery, there are…
An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed
Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the…
Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso
As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday…
Animal magic: children’s books for Christmas
J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod(Hachette, £20) was…
Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme
How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram…
Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman
‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the…
