Lead book review

Nautilus

The toughest, smartest, strangest creatures ever to evolve are nearing the end of their continental shelf life

23 May 2015 9:00 am

The rich, strange, finely balanced ecosystems of the oceans — on which our lives depend — are profoundly threatened, says Rose George

Out of the woods: American forces attack a German machine gun post, December 1944. The grim determination of the Allies, whose heroism kept the Germans at bay, helped pave the way for the final Russian advance on Berlin

The beginning of the end

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Both German and Allied troops could be accused of war crimes in the struggle for the Ardennes. It’s a tragic and gruesome history, involving heavy casualties — but flashes of black humour make it bearable, says Clare Mulley

Carnage on the home front: revisiting a forgotten disaster of the first world war

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher on a little-known episode of first world war history when a munitions factory in Kent exploded in April 1916, claiming over 100 lives

Family photo of Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow’s fiction: a warehouse of stolen property

2 May 2015 9:00 am

Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine

Dublin’s docks were shelled from the Liffey by the British admiralty gunboat, the Helga, during the Easter Rising

Pitfalls on the road to the Rising

25 April 2015 9:00 am

The centenary of the Easter Rising is already being commemorated. Ahead of the flood of books that will follow, Roy Foster chooses two impressive, if sombre ones to be going on with

An Armenian orphan in 1915. Hundreds of thousands of Christian women and children who survived the genocide suffered forced conversion to Islam

At last: a calm, definitive account of the Armenian genocide

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi

Plumber, taxi driver, mystic, musician — the many facets of Philip Glass

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher infinitely prefers the words to the music of the maverick ‘minimalist’ composer

RAMC stretcher-bearers from the South Eastern Mounted Brigade enter the Field Ambulance dressing station at Y Ravine. Picture courtesy of Stephen Chambers

The other trenches: the Dardanelles, 100 years on

4 April 2015 9:00 am

Peter Parker discerns classical allusion amid the horror in two books commemorating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign

Charles Dodgson

Stolen kisses and naked girls: there is much to wonder about in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland

28 March 2015 9:00 am

A.S. Byatt explores the dark alternatives to innocence in Lewis Carroll’s deeply disturbing looking-glass world

William Hogarth’s ‘Night’, in his series ‘Four Times of the Day’ (1736), provides a glimpse of the anarchy and squalor of London’s nocturnal streets

Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters

21 March 2015 9:00 am

James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night

Lieutenant William Alexander Kerr earns the Victoria Cross in the Great Uprising of 1857

British India — the scene of repeated war crimes throughout the 19th century

14 March 2015 9:00 am

William Dalrymple is uncomfortably reminded of the astonishing savagery by which the East India Company maintained the Raj throughout the 19th century

‘Orange, Red, Yellow’, 1956, by Mark Rothko

A strain of mysticism is discernible in the floating colour fields of Mark Rothko’s glowing canvases

7 March 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher on the perverse, tormented Mark Rothko, whose anger and depression — often painfully apparent in his art — only increased with his success

A ‘nurse log’ — a tree stump in which a seed has germinated, thereby avoiding browsing herbivores and the overshading of undergrowth. From Uncommon Ground by Dominick Tyler

Fizmer, feetings, flosh, blinter - enjoy these words and forget them immediately, advises Adam Nicolson

28 February 2015 9:00 am

It is not only archaic or dialect terms in natural history we’re now missing in everyday speech, says Adam Nicolson. Soon children won’t even know what a dandelion is

When the money ran out, so did the idealism in post-Revolutionary France

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr

Roman mosaic from Pompeii depicting Darius III at the Battle of Issus (333 BC), in which he was defeated by Alexander the Great

Darius III: Alexander’s stooge

14 February 2015 9:00 am

The ‘Great Kings’ of Persia were renowned for their good looks and imposing stature, but they will always, throughout history, be eclipsed by the Greeks, says Tom Holland

John Galliano at Paris Fashion Week 2010

Drink, drugs and dressing-up: behind the scenes of the fashion industry

7 February 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher explores a dangerously intoxicating world, and discovers just how quickly famous designers can become an irrelevance

Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?

31 January 2015 9:00 am

T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation

King Louis IX embarks for the Crusades

The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism

The Merchant (left) and the Physician from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales

A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world

17 January 2015 9:00 am

Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry

Edith Pearlman in 2012

The short story in Britain today: enough to make Conan Doyle weep

10 January 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher bewails the current neglect of the short story, especially in the British literary press

Henry VIII, Edward VI, Charles I, George VI and George V

Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty

3 January 2015 9:00 am

Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs

‘The Lion Queen’

Roll up, roll up! A history of the circus from Ancient Egypt to the present

13 December 2014 9:00 am

Nell Gifford joins a colourful troupe of acrobats, contortionists, lion-tamers, freaks and funambulists

An unholy cross between Big Ben and Las Vegas, the Makkah Royal Clock Tower stands on an estimated 400 sites of cultural and historical importance

Mecca: from shrine to shopping mall

6 December 2014 9:00 am

The Saudis, official custodians of Islam’s holiest place, have bulldozed its historical sites, perverted its religion and turned Mecca into one vast shopping mall, says Justin Marozzi

Eugene O’Neill with his last wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, who safeguarded him, and enabled him to write his later plays, though friends and family considered her his jailer

Eugene O’Neill: the dark genius of American theatre

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century

Matthew Parris on Owen Jones, Alan Johnson on hawks, David Crane on Noah’s Flood: Spectator books of the year

22 November 2014 9:00 am

A further selection of the best and most overrated books of 2014, chosen by some of our regular reviewers