Books
Shades of the prison house: the ghosts of suicides fill our prisons
As an inmate, Chris Atkins discovered just how violent and chaotic prison life is. His diaries highlight a national scandal – and the dangerous incompetence of the Ministry of Justice, says Will Heaven
Metternich gets a makeover
This is a giant Teutonic forest of a book, to be progressed through with determination as if by seasoned infantry;…
Hell and high water: eco-anxiety dominates Jenny Offill’s latest novel
Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s impressive third novel Weather, is ‘enmeshed’ with her brother, according to her psychologist-cum-meditation teacher.…
Why were Kraftwerk such a colossal success?
Everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no front man, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic…
Home was not where the heart was for the Enlightenment’s intellectuals
Emily Thomas is a distinguished academic philosopher who has ‘spent a lot of time by herself getting lost around the…
Wouldn’t the migrant crisis make fantastic reality TV? Timur Vermes’s The Hungry and the Fat reviewed
The context for The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermes’s new satirical novel, is not as far-fetched as all that.…
It’s easy to forget how many respectable people embraced eugenics
Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries…
Dr Livingstone becomes a dead weight: Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah
The scope of Petina Gappah’s impressive novel is laid out in the prologue: the death of the Victorian explorer David…
The hundreds of languages spoken in London are the city’s greatest glory
Every history of London — and there have been very many — has looked at the importance for the city…
The blistering experience of writing about Samuel Beckett
For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work…
‘This pain, of all pains, cannot be palliated’: a doctor cares for her dying father
Dear Life arrives at a time when the public appetite for the personal accounts of medical insiders shows no sign…
More secrets from the Underground Railroad: The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates reviewed
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel transports us to antebellum Virginia, when the tobacco wealth of years gone by is dwindling, due…
Unspeakably prolix and petty: will anyone want to read John Bercow’s autobiography?
In his autobiography, John Bercow takes his peerage as a given. But that might be scuppered by accusations of bullying, says Lynn Barber
Death in the Cape – the lonely fate of Mary Kingsley
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century…
The stomach for the fight: cooking for Churchill during the war
Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close…
There’s something hot about a hat
When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is…
Philip Hensher’s latest novel is a State of the Soul book
This is a very nuanced and subtle novel by Philip Hensher, which manages the highwire act of treating its characters…
A dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara: Actress, by Anne Enright, reviewed
Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It…
Hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight in Berlin
Of the many bleak moments that have lodged in my mind since reading this extraordinary book the most unshakeable is…
How long is long enough to look at a work of art?
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…
Lake Ohrid: an oasis of peace in the war-torn Balkans
Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of…
It’s not the dark hours the insomniac dreads but the clear light of day
The insomniac may come to dread the night’s solitude, but the next day poses the greater challenge. That’s when you…
The real Calamity Jane was distressingly unlike her legend
Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different
Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is certainly no Abyssinian Andy McNab
In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for…
The downside of mindfulness
Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which…
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