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A choice of this year’s gift books
Sporting trivia, the language of cats and the comic genius of Barry Cryer feature among the best of the year’s stocking-fillers
Britney Spears is back with a vengeance
After years of abuse and being reduced to the status of child-robot, the singer is back on track with soaring album sales and a smash-hit memoir
What would life on Mars actually look like?
It would need more than 100 million people to make it viable for a start – living in airlocked, subterranean bases, producing food and oxygen in artificially-lit greenhouses
A history of the onion leaves one crying for more
Mark Kurlansky’s treatment of a vegetable which was domesticated at least 7,000 years ago and on which the world’s cuisines depend feels rushed and inadequate
How sport helped shape the British character
David Horspool connects different sports to our historical experience: cricket with class, golf with property rights, tennis with female emancipation and boxing with ethnicity
When atonal music was original and exciting
Alexander Goehr, the sole survivor of the radical Manchester School of Music in the 1960s, describes turning pre-war European tradition into British cutting edge
No nonsense in the kitchen
The forthright food columnist Rachel Cooke has little patience with faddy eaters, ‘meditative’ kitchen tasks or the craze for Portuguese custard tarts
The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed
Sinister preparations for the apocalypse by a few Silicon Valley billionaires must be thwarted in this part-thriller, part-Big Tech critique, part-meditation on doomsday
The Duke of Windsor had much to be thankful for
Defending the ‘maligned’ Duke, Jane Marguerite Tippett fails to mention how hard officials worked to suppress evidence of his treachery and prevent a court martial in 1940
A multicultural microcosm: Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Lethem returns to the borough with a tale of violence, neglect and demographic change over the decades, tinged with nostalgia but far from sentimental
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
A choice of this year’s cook books
Recipes and food history from Blanche Vaughan, Sky McAlpine, Pen Vogler, Fuschia Dunlop and Fred Hogge, among others
The feel-good football story of Watford Forever
From the age of six, Reggie Dwight followed Watford FC’s fortunes avidly – and when he became the multimillionaire Elton John decided to do all he could to improve them
Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed
Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s
Leap of faith: the miraculous phenomenon of levitating saints
St Joseph of Cupertino liked to nest in the tops of trees, and Allied pilots were dissuaded by the airborne Padre Pio from dropping bombs near his monastery in Apulia
The balance of power between humans and machines
Robert Skidelsky dismisses the possibility of our annihilation by a superintelligent computer system, since ‘science tells us that we cannot create such a being’. But does it?
How has the Conservative party’s ‘Dr No’ escaped everyone’s notice for so long?
This malevolent figure has been at the centre of the party for more than 40 years, says Nadine Dorries. But nothing in The Plot bears much relation to reality
The best of this year’s children’s books
Among many delights, the Greco-Persian wars are brought to thrilling new life and a truly bizarre Alaskan folk tale is retold
Why do the British still dream of bricks and mortar?
For the past century, a ‘property-owning democracy’ has been envisaged as a kind of magic cure for social ills. But high prices now mean the opposite of emancipation for many
Magnificent men in their automobiles: the 1907 Peking-Paris rally
Kassia St Clair tells the gripping story of how competitors drove 15,000 km across mountains, desert and flooded rivers to prove the practicality of the early motor car
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed
Everything blends into everything else as an Aboriginal knight errant sets out on a quest to save his scorched native bushlands
The horror of finding oneself ‘young-old’
‘I used to run upstairs all the time,’ sixtysomething Marcus Berkmann recalls wistfully, as, midway through life’s journey, he wakes to find himself in a dark wood
A bird’s-eye view: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, reviewed
Six astronauts at the International Space Station observe the ravages on Mother Earth, but remain hopeful that mankind will find another parent planet
The horrors of the ‘Upskirt Decade’
Lynn Barber 25 November 2023 9:00 am
The century began as a monstrous time to be famous and female – epitomised by the Tulsa judge who, in 2006, seemed to rule that no woman had a right to privacy in public