More from Books

A double loss: The Möbius Strip, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed

12 July 2025 9:00 am

Lacey writes in the aftermath of two break-ups – one romantic, one religious – in a hybrid work that even she has difficulty defining

Have the Gallaghers suffered from ‘naked classism’?

12 July 2025 9:00 am

Their biographer thinks so. But if 1980s Britain had been less class-ridden, the brilliant Noel might have been drawn to further education, got a ‘good’ job and been lost to music forever

The importance of bread as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance

12 July 2025 9:00 am

Two authors writing in response to the war use baking as a prism through which to view the country’s heritage and its defiance of Putin

Collateral damage: Vulture, by Phoebe Green, reviewed

12 July 2025 9:00 am

Sarah Byrne is covering her first war, reporting from Gaza. But her pursuit of a scoop triggers a series of events that may haunt her forever

Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed

12 July 2025 9:00 am

A sequel to Hideous Kinky sees the two sisters Lucy and Bea, still close to their bohemian mother, trying (and failing) to negotiate life on their own terms as adults

Whatever happened to Caroline Lane? A Margate mystery

12 July 2025 9:00 am

How could a feisty middle-aged woman suddenly vanish from the seaside town without trace? David Whitehouse set out to discover

There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep

12 July 2025 9:00 am

Soon after Hitler came to power, a Jewish journalist, deprived of regular employment, began secretly recording her nightmares – and, as the terror increased, those of her fellow citizens

A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed

12 July 2025 9:00 am

An unlikely friendship develops between a taciturn local youth and a fast-talking American film-maker in a grim coastal town in postwar Britain

One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed

12 July 2025 9:00 am

An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’

From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft

12 July 2025 9:00 am

The Theatre itself, and the works staged at England’s first purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch, all emerged from the guilds that formed the bedrock of the urban economy

Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed

5 July 2025 9:00 am

A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting

Masculinity in crisis – portrayed by Michael Douglas

5 July 2025 9:00 am

As the Manhattan attorney in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas epitomises the alarm many men felt for women’s new-found openness about sexuality

Could the giant panda be real?

5 July 2025 9:00 am

Even in the past century the animal was considered so exotic that many doubted its very existence

Highs and lows: The Boys, by Leo Robson, reviewed

5 July 2025 9:00 am

Mourning the loss of their parents, two brothers succumb to listlessness and lethargy in a sweltering London gripped by Olympic fever

Tim Franks goes in search of what it means to be Jewish

5 July 2025 9:00 am

In a thought-provoking family history, the BBC journalist addresses questions of identity – and to what extent we are products of our forebears

Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press

5 July 2025 9:00 am

Two former Izvestiya journalists describe how all but the bravest in the media have crumpled under pressure to toe the Putinist line

The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success

5 July 2025 9:00 am

The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim

What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition

28 June 2025 9:00 am

The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today

The wolf as symbol of European anxieties

28 June 2025 9:00 am

This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo

A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed

28 June 2025 9:00 am

Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire

A life among movie stars can damage your health

28 June 2025 9:00 am

So Dustin Hoffman tells the teenage Matthew Specktor as they share cigarette breaks at CAA, the Los Angeles talent agency they both frequent

Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine

28 June 2025 9:00 am

At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline government service, and politics gets much of the blame as Vine looks back over the wreckage

What was millennial girl power really about?

28 June 2025 9:00 am

In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘empowerment’ was a girl’s watchword. But she was empowered primarily to be pleasing to men and, above all, never grow up

The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history

28 June 2025 9:00 am

Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law

The rose-tinted view of female friendship shatters

21 June 2025 9:00 am

Are women’s relationships with each other today more brittle and less supportive than in the past?