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How Alice Prin conquered bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
Three men on a pilgrimage: Haven, by Emma Donoghue, reviewed
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
We do love to be beside the seaside
In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…
Fleeing paradise: eden, by Jim Crace, reviewed
Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should…
It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed
Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…
More stirring stories of little ships
‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that…
The invisible man: The Glass Pearls, by Emeric Pressburger, reviewed
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Slavoj Zizek: the philosopher who annoys all the right people
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
What exactly do we mean by the mind?
Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…
The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Has Cuba’s revolution finally fizzled out?
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
Close to extinction: Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, reviewed
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
A gay journey of self-discovery
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
In praise of burning pianos
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Must we now despise colonial architecture too?
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
Who planned Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson’s murder?
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage: On Java Road, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history: Ancestry, by Simon Mawer, reviewed
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
