Lead book review
For millennials, pre-Thatcher Britain must seem another — quite mystifying — country
Lymeswold; Hi-de-Hi!; nuclear-free zones; Walkmans; the Metro; Red Robbo; the SDP; Michael Foot’s Cenotaph donkey-jacket; Protest and Survive; Steve Davis…
The best of journeys: Justin Marozzi’s monumental trek through the history of the Muslim world
This impressively clever, careful, and often beautiful book is the best sort of journey. It takes us through 15 cities…
No one held Susan Sontag in higher esteem than she did: Her Life reviewed
Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing…
What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?
Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a…
Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?
Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity…
Novel explosives of the Cold War
One autumn night in 1991, I stood on the rooftop terrace of a tacky villa in Saranda once owned by…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…
America’s brutal borstals: The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed
Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a…
Words of war: interviews with the children who survived Hitler’s invasion of Russia
In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front…
The tragic story of Witold Pilecki, whose reports from Auschwitz fell on deaf ears
On 14 October 1942, the 23 Swiss members of the International Committee of the Red Cross met in Geneva to…
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
Solving the mystery of my mother’s kidnap
At first glance, Laura Cumming’s memoir On Chapel Sands begins with what appears to be a happy ending. On an…
Polari, the secret gay argot, is making a surprising comeback
Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man.…
Heroism in a hopeless cause: why the crusades remain fascinating
The crusades are part of everyone’s mental image of the Middle Ages. They extended, in one form or another, from…
Hostility to Islam has disguised a host of other prejudices
In 2011, when the editor of Charlie Hebdo put Muhammad on the cover, he did so as the heir to…
Toy theatres on the stage: the set designs of Maurice Sendak
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression…
Towards a technological utopia
The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will…
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
How to lose friends and alienate people: Richard Holbrooke was a past master
You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under…
Not all British memsahibs were racist snobs
Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the…
Has Shakespeare become the mascot of Brexit Britain?
The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation,…
A new version of Saladin — as silver-tongued diplomat
I can only remember one page of any of the dozens of Ladybird histories that I read avidly as a…
Time for a Tippett revival
Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English…