Books
Novel explosives of the Cold War
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by…
We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy
My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome…
From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy
This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should…
A single man of no fortune must be in want of a job: younger sons in Jane Austen’s England
Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure…
Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew
How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with…
The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames
The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore.…
Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?
There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles…
A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part
Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
A novel take on the Western: Inland, by Téa Obreht, reviewed
Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong
Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…
Does Kim Jong-un deliberately emulate a Bond villain?
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…
Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…
For the inhabitants of Ramallah, ‘home’ is just a memory
On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be…
A child’s-eye view of the world: The Curse of the School Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, reviewed
Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The…
The crime of passion that kept the nation enthralled
No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive…
Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring
Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…
Erotic longings that left me cold
The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less…
Eternal truths: Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry, reviewed
It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around…
Bohemians rhapsodising: the favourite haunts of writers and artists
Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her…
Out of sight, out of mind
Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People,…
In praise of the semicolon, a most maligned punctuation mark
Now, how shall I start this review? I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.) I loved this book,…
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