Books
Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature
‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…
Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing
Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did,…
Five bluestockings in one Bloomsbury square
The presiding genius of this original and erudite book is undoubtedly Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’…
A lovable, impossible man: Bryan Robertson, gifted curator and Spectator critic
Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of…
Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive…
Is it a Rake’s or a Pilgrim’s Progress for Rob Doyle?
‘To live and die without knowing the psychedelic experience,’ says the narrator of Threshold, ‘is comparable to never having encountered…
Zimbabwe’s chaotic history has at least produced some outstanding fiction
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean…
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
Whores of phwoar: women talking dirty
Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such…
The Tudor dynasty owed everything to Margaret Beaufort’s machinations
Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure…
Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort
A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the…
The deadly war game of the Battle of the Atlantic
My father served in the Royal Navy during the second world war. He drank over-proof rum and smoked unfiltered cigarettes,…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
The coldest war of all: sabotaging the Nazis in Norway
Anyone mildly interested in the second world war probably knows two things about our wartime alliance with Norway, following its…
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a long, hard slog
The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who sounds like a sneeze and reads like a fever, is on a mission to…
Why we’re all in love with Fleabag
Why would you need the scripts for Fleabag? It’s hardly a lost classic. It’s always popping up on BBC iPlayer.…
Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters
In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare
The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own…
From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book
Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published…
David Bowie: the boy who never gave up
A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up…
Who are today’s fictional heroes?
What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality:…
Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot
I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…
How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian
Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to…
Neither ‘Mad Dog’ nor ‘Warrior Monk’, General Jim Mattis is a thoughtful strategist
General Jim Mattis ended his remarkable career as a four-star US marine general, and finally as US secretary of defense.…
