More from Books
The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills
The society rebel with a fondness for cross-dressing travelled widely in Africa, South America and the Middle East, dying in 1959, aged 70, with bags packed for the next expedition
The vagaries of laboratory experiments
With much research threatened by flawed methods and misconduct, will AI bring unprecedented scientific progress or merely increase the unreliability problem?
The unfairytale life of two European princesses
Wounded by their husbands’ infidelity and shattered by the deaths of their only sons, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France defied court protocol in a bid for independence
The soldier poet: Viva Byron!, by Hugh Thomson, reviewed
What would have happened had Lord Byron fought for Simon Bolivar in Latin America, rather than dying of fever in Missolonghi, campaigning for Greek independence?
The mystery of the missing man: Green Ink, by Stephen May, reviewed
Things look bad for the former socialist MP Victor Grayson after he threatens to expose David Lloyd George’s cash for honours scandal in 1920
The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller
When post-natal depression descends, Lucy Mangan describes reaching for Lee Child, finding catharsis in his no-nonsense villain-bashing
Survival of the cruellest in 16th-century Constantinople
It was kill or be killed for the Ottoman sultan’s heirs in a bizarre succession ritual involving the ruthless culling of close relatives
The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke
Among the many ‘rare tongues’ explored by Lorna Gibb is the use of smoke signals by native north Americans, the oldest form of long-distance communication
A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed
A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’
Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed
An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer
The wonder of the human body
Gabriel Weston intersperses her guide to the structure and functions of the body’s organs with personal anecdotes and moral reflections
Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed
Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on
What Ovid in exile was missing
The poet complained bitterly of the barbarism of Tomis, on the Black Sea – but it was actually a thriving entrepot with a rich culture, like many of the Roman empire’s remoter cities
Liberty is a loaded word
Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint
How Cold War Czechoslovakia became a haven for terrorists
Simply to oppose and aggravate the West, the country supported a range of radical Palestinian organisations – but their violence and unpredictability became serious liabilities
Butchered for feather beds: the brutal end of the great auk
The large, flightless birds that once inhabited the North Atlantic cliffs in their millions were extinct by the 1840s, as the demand for down-filled mattresses increased
Things Fall Apart: Flesh, by David Szalay, reviewed
The fluctuating fortunes of an ambitious young Hungarian in London provide a gripping study of the choices that can make or break a life
The punishing life of a chief whip
Simon Hart describes his frustrations as he grapples with the rivalries and petty jealousies of colleagues lobbying for peerages and knighthoods as the Tory party implodes
The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive
One side wants to preserve core Judeo-Christian values; the other, driven by Islamist extremists, seeks to establish a dangerous new world of deracinated individuals, says Melanie Phillips
The weirdness of the pre-Beatles pop world
As his mental health declined, the record producer Joe Meek grew increasingly fascinated by the other-worldly, communing in graveyards with Buddy Holly and the Pharaoh Ramses the Great
How can a biography of Woody Allen be so unbearably dull?
Only after 300-plus pages of tedious filmography do we finally get to the rift with Mia Farrow and the family scandals that have dogged Allen ever since
Is Keir Starmer really Morgan McSweeney’s puppet?
Two lobby journalists portray the PM as the pawn of ‘the Irishman’ and as ‘a passenger on a train driven by others’ – but there is much more to Starmer than that
Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
It’s Vienna, 1966, and a young labourer casts a speculative eye on a ramshackle café in the corner of the Karmelitermarkt, daring to restore it and improve his lot
The Assyrians were really not so different from us
Selena Wisnom shows us children toiling over their writing tablets, taking pride in schoolwork, and a heartbroken scribe finding consolation in literature after the death of his king in battle
Three’s a crowd: The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride, reviewed
Tension mounts between young Eily and her 40-year-old partner, Stephen, when Stephen’s daughter, Grace, appears, underlining the couple’s different ages and experiences
