More from Books
Back on the road: Less is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you…
A character assassination of Rudy Giuliani
Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…
The Index of Prohibited Books makes a fine reading list
In a classic paradox of bureaucracy, the Index of Forbidden Books only really hit its stride when its original task…
Mad men plotting: The Unfolding, by A.M. Homes, reviewed
Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother,…
A translator’s responsibilities are as formidable as a transplant surgeon’s
When asked what it is we do, translators often resort to metaphors. We liken the act of translation to performing…
Robert Harris's gripping Act of Oblivion is let down by anachronisms
When Charles II became king of England in 1660, he pardoned most of those who’d committed crimes during the civil…
A single meal in Rome is a lesson in Italian history
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV…
A ghoulish afterlife: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka, reviewed
Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set…
Ballet comes of age with Sergei Diaghilev
‘What exactly is it you do?’ asked a bamboozled King Alfonso XIII of Spain upon meeting Sergei Diaghilev at a…
A.N. Wilson has many regrets
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
Britain’s recent darkest hour: the betrayal of the Chagos Islands
Philippe Sands’s compelling new book opens in 2018 at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Liseby Elysé…
The curse of Medusa: Stone Blind, by Natalie Haynes, reviewed
Natalie Haynes has been compared with Mary Renault, the historical novelist who scandalised readers in the 1950s with her unflinching…
As normal as blueberry pie: Oscar Hammerstein II, through his letters
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and…
Finally, the Sherpas are heroes of their own story
John Keay has for many years been a key historian and prolific contributor to the romance attaching to the highest…
Scotland’s deer are proving deeply divisive
On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just…
The real Dick Whittington and the folklore legend
In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes…
Women artists have been ignored for far too long
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…
Bittersweet memories: Ti Amo, by Hanne Ørstavik, reviewed
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
Second chances: The Marble Staircase, by Elizabeth Fair, reviewed
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
Why Tate Modern seems more like a playground than an art gallery
This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…
Pre-Mussolini, most Italians couldn’t understand each other
Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…
How Putin manipulated history to help Russians feel good again
Every country has an origin story but nonehas ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject…
The nondescript house that determined the outcome of the second world war
Sometimes the struggle for a single small strongpoint can tip the whole balance of a greater battle. One thinks of…
Wall Street madness: Trust, by Hernan Diaz, reviewed
‘I don’t trust fiction,’ the famous author told me, both of us several glasses to the good. ‘It contains too…
A dying doctor’s last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
