Books
In the land of the blind
Somehow, American culture has got itself into a terrible mess of division and acrimony: elites against mainstream, progressives against conservatives,…
In the trenches
I can hardly recall a more engaging and uplifting biography than this life of Major-General William Holmes, who was killed…
A Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy in Uttar Pradesh
In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches…
Gabriel Matzneff: the paedophile who hid in plain sight
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
The stuff of fiction: Elizabeth Bowen exploits her extra-marital affairs
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
The true diplomat considers the future more than the present
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
CIA spies lose faith
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
A complex creation myth: Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth, reviewed
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Reality and online life clash: No One is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood, reviewed
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and…
Geology’s dry, rocky road
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
When poison is the cure: examining today’s processed meat
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was…
On the track of a mysterious recluse: Maxwell’s Demon, by Steven Hall, reviewed
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
What does ownership of land really mean?
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…
The cannibal feast: Mother for Dinner, by Shalom Auslander, reviewed
Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from…
Who in their right mind would choose to be a forensic psychiatrist?
When police were called to a block of flats in north London at the beginning of 2002, they expected to…
Francis Bacon: king of the self-made myth
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
The serious rows at Marvel Comics
If Marvel characters seem dysfunctional, just look at their creators, says Dorian Lynskey
From cheap sex comedies to gritty brilliance: British culture comes of age
As readers of a certain age will realise, Looking for a New England derives its title from ‘A New England’,…
Imagining a future for John Keats — the novelist
Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher
Social mobility has become a meaningless mantra
‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to…
A phoenix from the ashes: 17th-century London reborn
Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for…
Betrayal was a routine business for George Blake
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…
A toxic atmosphere: Slough House, by Mick Herron, reviewed
Mick Herron has been called ‘the John le Carré of his generation’ by the crime writer Val McDermid, and in…
A bubo-busting muckfest: Hurdy Gurdy, by Christopher Wilson, reviewed
In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what…
How did Robert Maxwell fool most of the people most of the time?
‘Everyone’s heard of Ghislaine Maxwell,’ says the blurb for Power: The Maxwells, a podcast series launched last month. ‘But there’s…
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