Books
Three remarkable sisters at the heart of 20th-century Chinese politics
In their lifetime, and afterwards, the Soong sisters from Shanghai seemed like figures from a Chinese fairy tale. There were…
David Cameron’s For the Record ends where the sorriest three years in modern British history begins
It’s fun to look for what’s missing in a memoir; the forgotten egos, the policy howlers buried for posterity. Some…
A work of art in more ways than one
Neil Hegarty’s new novel, The Jewel, is a mass of contradictions. It’s about an art heist, but it’s not fun.…
Living on a nuclear submarine does your head in
Richard Humphreys spent a good part of five years, between the ages of 18 and 23, living inside a nuclear…
Oswald of Northumbria – an Anglo-Saxon saint-king of the north for our time
In Hamlet a gravedigger asks the riddle: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or…
Gilgamesh, Michael Schmidt’s ‘life’ of a poem
In the mid-19th century, around lunchtime, a pale young man with an enormous beard could be seen in the British…
A thought-provoking work of ‘moral atonement’ and ‘comparative redemption’
No nation’s defeat is ever quite straight-forward, and sometimes downfall can bring its own kind of posthumous victory. By the…
Betrayal in Berlin – a small but important part of the Cold War story
The Berlin Tunnel was an Anglo-American eavesdropping operation mounted against Russian-controlled East Berlin in 1955–56. It was a technical and…
Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality is a hard to get your head around
Vibrations, chemicals and light-waves exist in the world; sounds, tastes, smells and colours only seem to. ‘Many sensations which are…
Patti Smith had a bad year in 2016
In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the…
Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea
Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities,…
Ian McEwan’s anti-Brexit satire is a damp squib
Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
Jessie Burton’s The Confession is, frankly, a bit heavy-handed
Jessie Burton is famous for her million-copy bestselling debut novel The Miniaturist, which she followed with The Muse. Now she’s…
Is the judiciary really so bad at judging character?
When I had a cough last week, my son Joe, who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears.…
Visiting the world’s masterpieces is a quixotic undertaking
From his base in London, Martin Gayford has spent much of his career as an art critic travelling. He has…
A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir…
A dog’s life is infinitely superior to our own — so let’s embrace it
The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a…
Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is even better on second reading
Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking…
A ménage à trois that worked: Ivan Turgenev and the Viardots
If we still bemoan a world of mass tourism, the mid 19th century, Orlando Figes reminds us, is where it…
Round North Korea with Michael Palin in rose-tinted spectacles
Michael Palin in North Korea, a two-part documentary in which the Python is given a tightly choreographed tour of that…
It’s easy to forget how undemocratic Europe was 50 years ago
The subtitle of Simon Reid-Henry’s substantial work indicates its thesis: ‘The remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971–2017.’…
As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker
Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited…
Why have the Swedes been incapable of finding Olof Palme’s murderer?
Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
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