Daniel Hahn

Does knotted string constitute ‘writing’?

16 April 2022 9:00 am

What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…

Experiences of Eton — and the success it rewards

10 July 2021 9:00 am

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was…

Wouldn’t the migrant crisis make fantastic reality TV? Timur Vermes’s The Hungry and the Fat reviewed

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

The context for The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermes’s new satirical novel, is not as far-fetched as all that.…

Web of deceit: disinformation could prove the most powerful weapon of all

3 August 2019 9:00 am

We could begin almost anywhere. But let’s start in Ukraine, with Babar Aliev. Babar is a former gang leader who…

Making the case for multilingualism – a timely reminder

9 March 2019 9:00 am

English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s…

Credit: Getty Images

Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…

It’s thought that counts when it comes to good prose

3 November 2018 9:00 am

This is a sentence. As is this — not an exceptionally beautiful one, but a sentence all the same, just…

The misery of policing the US–Mexico border

5 May 2018 9:00 am

Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…

Portrait of the reader as devoted book-owner: Alberto Manguel in happier days, at home in his library in France

Packing away my 35,000 books was like writing my own obituary

14 April 2018 9:00 am

Alberto Manguel is a kind of global Reader Laureate: he is reading’s champion, its keenest student and most zealous proselytiser,…

The enigma of Enric Marco

11 November 2017 9:00 am

Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil…

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle

Do myths and folklore damage children’s brains?

4 June 2016 9:00 am

Children’s fantasy literature has never been just one thing. Animal fables, folk and fairy tales were not originally intended for…

Nazis in the dock: Hans Frank replies to questioning during the Nuremberg Trials

Genocide is named and shamed

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Prosecution for genocide or crimes against humanity is now a given in international law. But before the Nuremberg Trials, these two groundbreaking notions didn’t exist. Daniel Hahn describes their origins and inspiration

The works by Quentin Blake are from the Neonatal Unit at Angers Maternity Hospital, France (2012).

Quentin Blake brings comfort and joy

9 April 2016 9:00 am

His professional achievements aside, Quentin Blake’s life has been rather short on biographical event, so this book is not a…

Pyramid texts at Saqqara

The writing on the wall at Saqqara is plain to see

6 February 2016 9:00 am

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Henry Coxwell and James Glaisher in their balloon car, studying the moisture content of the atmosphere

The weather: a very British obsession

4 July 2015 9:00 am

As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple…

Milan Kundera’s fun-free festival

20 June 2015 9:00 am

We begin in Paris with an introduction to five insignificant friends. One (Ramon) is walking past the new Chagall exhibition,…

Reading one book from every country in the world sounds like fun - until you come to North Korea

28 February 2015 9:00 am

One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial.…

Europe in 60 languages

15 November 2014 9:00 am

So Basque is an ergative language! Well, I never. I couldn’t have told you that a week ago. I even…