Books
How Diderot’s pleas to end despotism fell on deaf ears in Russia
Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon…
Days of the locust: our continuing battle with an ancient plague
Carried on monsoon winds across the Red Sea, vast swarms of desert locusts have posed a deadly threat to the…
Writing as revenge: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, reviewed
Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as…
A Mojave desert mystery: The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami, reviewed
Late one night, on a dimly lit stretch of highway in a small town in the Californian Mojave desert, an…
Why are we so obsessed with Jack the Ripper, but care so little for his victims?
Before she was the subject of true-crime mythologising, Catherine Eddowes made her living from it, selling ballads based on real-life…
The short, happy life of the long playing record
On 19 June 1948, the modern LP was unveiled at a press conference by the Columbia Records president Ted Wallerstein,…
Brexit can be surprisingly thrilling, as Alan Judd’s latest spy novel demonstrates
The long gestation period of Brexit has allowed authors to plan and write and publish novels in time for the…
The Englishman who saved Japan’s cherry blossoms
Between 1639 and 1853, seeds and scions of flowering cherry trees travelled across Japan to Edo (present-day Tokyo). Each came…
How Polynesia came to be inhabited is still one of the world’s great mysteries
Later this month, a boat builder from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia will fly to the Russian city of Sochi to…
Further adventures of a dysfunctional family: Reasons to be Cheerful, by Nina Stibbe, reviewed
My ex-dentist resembled a potato wearing a Patek Phillipe. In those precious moments between the golf course and the cruise…
The queen of England who never was: the life of the Empress Matilda
The Empress Matilda, mother of the Plantagenet dynasty, is the earliest queen of England who never was; by rights she…
Missive from a living fossil: Little Boy, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reviewed
In his adopted city of San Francisco, the poet, publisher and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti is venerated to levels nearing those…
In the pavilion of fun: Bowlaway, by Elizabeth McCracken, reviewed
Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel in 18 years, is a great American candy-colour Buddenbrooks, a multi-generational epic spanning almost 100…
Richard Sorge: the Soviet Union’s master spy
Interviewed on the Today programme on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei admitted: ‘It…
Who was the real St Patrick: an evangelist or a tax dodger?
St Patrick’s Day, on 17 March, is now regarded as a prime opportunity for Irish politicians to travel abroad on…
The subversive, Austenesque wit of ‘Late in the Day’, by Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’…
The uphill task of judging whether Tony Blair was a villain or hero
On the day that Tony Blair left the Commons chamber for the last time (to a standing ovation led by…
Has Dave Eggers finally found his voice?
The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down…
The cheerful manifesto of anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite
Ashton Applewhite is a leading American ‘inspirer’ on how to make the most of being over the hill. She has…
Two big books on motherhood and childlessness: Catherine Mayer got emotional
A single survey, elevated by news organisations to scientific certainty, suggests that air travellers may be more susceptible to tears…
One of the world’s great love stories
‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about…
America’s empire – a story of the secret and the convenient
Where other nations disbanded their empires following the second world war, America’s underwent transubstantiation, from something solid to something more…
Making the case for multilingualism – a timely reminder
English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s…
Sadie Jones’s modern morality tale
The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point.…
In (vain) search of the snow leopard
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him…
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