Books
Missing chapters
Between them, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have a wealth of research and writing experience, and their biography of…
An independent observer: Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
Stealing the story: A Lonely Man, by Chris Power, reviewed
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
How the third world war was narrowly averted
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in…
Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener
Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane
Water, water everywhere: Touring the Land of the Dead, by Maki Kashimada, reviewed
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Life on Earth is too tame for eccentric American billionaires
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
It is impossible to imagine Henrician England except through the eyes of Hans Holbein
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
Even the Queen wasn’t spared Prince Philip’s bad temper
Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give…
The high and low life of John Craxton
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
From family home to mausoleum: the Musée Nissim Camondo
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
Eliminate the positive: Come Join Our Disease, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
Why should art have ever been considered a male preserve?
Sixty years ago, women were still excluded from the art history canon, says Laura Freeman
A meditation on everyday life: Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny, reviewed
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Stephen Hawking: the myth and the reality
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
Stalin as puppet master: how Uncle Joe manipulated the West
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Not just a trolley dolly: the demanding life of an air hostess
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
Ice and snow and sea and sky: Lean Fall Stand, by Jon McGregor, reviewed
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Puzzle Pieces: Cowboy Graves, by Roberto Bolaño, reviewed
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Steam trains make a comeback under the guise of heritage
So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s,…
Despotic laws can — even should — be ignored, says Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
Pilgrimage is beginning to resemble any other kind of holiday
Hidden away in the Old City of Jerusalem is a tattoo parlour which has been serving pilgrims for the past…
Haunted by the soft, sweet power of the violin
An extraordinary omission from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is the lyre, the instrument closest…
Back in the magic land of Narnia
Philip Womack 1 May 2021 9:00 am
C. S. Lewis’s enchanting Chronicles of Narniaseries has, in recent years, come under critical fire. It’s racist, sexist, colonialist; blatant…