Books
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…
Cheering for Jürgen Klopp: Liverpool FC’s manager can do no wrong
As his biographer, I feel obliged to quote John Updike’s wise sayings — among them the first rule in his…
A closing of ranks: The Searcher, by Tana French, reviewed
If the homage wasn’t clear from the title, Tana French makes sure throughout The Searcher, her seventh novel and second…
Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed
Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the…
High-speed trains, planes and automobiles are increasingly redundant
Should the world be faster or slower? This is a question relevant to global economics, politics and culture. But not…
Sunshine on a plate: the year’s best cookbooks
In the dark days of a terrible winter, Elizabeth David began writing her first book, about Mediterranean food. The timing…
A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed
Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which…
Tortured youths: how childhood misery often makes for genius
Greatness. Genius. Can you bottle it? Is there a formula? Inspired by his Radio 4 series Great Lives, Matthew Parris…
Claire Messud helps us see the familiar with new eyes
The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque,…
Harold Bloom finally betrays how little he really understood literature
Harold Bloom devoted his life to literature – but he had little feeling for words, says Philip Hensher
Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science
One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all,…
The autistic mind could hold the key to the future
An old, cynical adage holds that ‘if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I remembered…
Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed
Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies…
Humiliating the IRA was a fatal mistake
It was said that Reginald Maudling, as home secretary, once boarded a plane in Belfast and immediately requested a stiff…
Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot
Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…
Gardening books for Christmas — reviewed by Ursula Buchan
Dan Pearson is one of the finest of all British garden designers, blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant…
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