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A strange vibration
Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
By Patten or design?
My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to…
Something in the water
‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Beyond the pale
You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of…
Voices of exile
During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of…
China syndrome
Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…
Self’s obsessions
This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a…
On matters maritime
The Greenland shark has to be one of the most fascinating creatures of which you’ve probably never heard. Growing sometimes…
Latest crime fiction
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city…
Taking the rough with the smooth
In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir…
Mother Medea
Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype…
Crossing the pond
What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to…
Dark night of the soul
As bombs fall everywhere in Syria and IS fighters destroy Palmyra, a musicologist in Vienna lies awake all night thinking…
Hot Spring
Imagine if Kathy Lette — or possibly Julie Burchill — had written a feminist, magic-realist saga that sent four women…
Always the Superbrat
John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to…
In defiance of Il Duce
The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite…
A woman of some importance
It might seem unlikely that a Christian noblewoman could have had influence over a Muslim city in the 13th century,…
Something nasty in the woodshed
I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream…
Doctor of humility
Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm (2014) was that rare thing — a neurosurgeon showing his fallibility in public and…
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