Books
Learning to talk
One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…
Deep learning
Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…
Harsh, but entertaining
When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…
The cult of Holy Bob
The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…
The hunger
In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…
Muddled in minutiae
‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…
Demonised by history
Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…
Britain über alles
David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…
A game of cat-and-mouse
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…
True grit
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
Madness in Manhattan
Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…
Redcoats and runaways
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during…
Swagger and squalor
This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…
Courting trouble
Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the…
Christianity triumphant – and destructive
In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of…
Looking back, losing bits
As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…
The journey of Adam and Eve
Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we…
Sappho in America
We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
Crusading passions
In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare: Monstrous familiar…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
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