More from Books
Our resentment of migrants is centuries old: the Little Englanders of the Tudor era
Hostility to ‘strangers’ from France and the Low Countries exploded in riots in 1517, when Englishmen were encouraged to ‘defend their nest’ and ‘hurt and grieve aliens for the common weale’
Small, skewed pictures that cast a spell: the art of Mollie Douthit
The novelist Sara Baume describes how her admiration for Douthit’s idiosyncratic oil paintings led to a strange, tentative friendship
Family Tyrant: The Anniversary, by Andrea Bajani, reviewed
A middle-aged Italian contemplates his traumatic childhood, lived in constant fear of his abusive father
Disability is becoming the new normal
Longer life expectancy means that most of us will eventually qualify as disabled. But how many of Britain’s present claimants are merely suffering from ‘anxiety’?
Persistent gossip about Brian Epstein’s death risks defining his life
Must the Beatles’ manager’s extraordinary vision be forever overshadowed by unfounded rumours of a contract killing?
Do single women bother to cook for themselves?
Eli Davies and her spinster friends admit to a mostly ‘feral’ diet – of Kettle Chips and a satsuma, or a handful of grated cheese, or toast, washed down with vodka
The uncertainty principle: The Interpreter’s Secret, by Andrew Rosenheim, reviewed
An interpreter working for the State Department hears of a clandestine arrangement between Washington and Moscow. But who to trust – and are seeming allies in fact adversaries?
Are good people made by good surroundings, or the other way round?
Joad Raymond Wren examines utopian schemes through the centuries, from Plato’s Republic to Womyn’s land, and concludes that we should never stop challenging the status quo
The joy of chucking little wooden blocks around
Neil Squires delights in the Finnish game of Mölkky, whereby players aim to knock over 12 numbered wooden skittles using a single throwing pin
Dull, duller and Dulles – was Churchill’s jibe about America’s Cold War icon unfair?
John Foster Dulles was forever going on about ‘boldness’ and dynamic change, but his limitations of perspective and philosophy become glaringly obvious in this latest biography
Nagging doubts: Twenty Minutes of Silence, by Hélène Bessette, reviewed
In a luxurious French villa, a man lies dead, shot with his own gun – and his wife and son become suspects. But new information emerges every time the scene is reviewed
Chinese puzzle or matryoshka doll – the complexity of Sino-Russia relations
For centuries, the wary neighbours have been united mainly in their opposition to the West – but is there now a new dynamic between the global powers?
Hot and bothered: Trouble Was, by Charlotte Edwardes, reviewed
Tempers boil over when nine-year-old Frank, his mother and siblings go to stay with an aunt on Exmoor in the blistering summer of 1976
Blame the Enlightenment for species extinction
Even such a key figure as Adam Smith believed that we would reach economic fulfilment before turning to the ‘real problems’ of nature and human life
The imaginative genius behind the Great Exhibition
The revenue derived from the international fair of 1851 helped fund the V&A, the Natural History and Science Museums and many other ‘Albertopolis’ institutions
Who needs an Italian beach when we have our own lidos?
With the continent now unbearably hot, these magnificent temples of swimming are experiencing a welcome revival, says Tom Fort
The clear and present danger of exploring the Gulag
When his plan to ski hundreds of miles up the frozen River Lena fails, Charlie Walker grows increasingly alarmed by his hostile reception in Siberia
A trove of avian lore and history
In richly poetic prose, Robert Macfarlane evokes the ways and wiles of birds, from the ‘thinker’ razorbills of Newfoundland to ocean-crossing whooper swans
A grandmother’s twisted mind: The Passage of Roses, by Tie Ning, reviewed
An ambitious, controlling matriarch will do anything to curry favour during the Cultural Revolution – even to the extent of deliberately harming her vulnerable young granddaughter
There will be blood – the vital work of field transfusion units
Roderick Bailey pays tribute to the highly mobile, tight-knit detachments that revolutionised military medicine and saved thousands of soldiers’ lives in the second world war
No fairytale: The Children, by Melissa Albert, reviewed
What caused the devastating house fire that killed a bestselling children’s author, leaving her son and daughter – the stars of her books – suddenly orphaned?
Alien fever shows no signs of abating
As long as the US government refuses to disclose its voluminous UFO files, rumours will intensify about ‘a secret that people have been killed to preserve’
Vigilante justice: Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, reviewed
The grotesque posthumous lynching of a homosexual by a frenzied mob prompts Sarr’s protagonist to investigate the shadow world of gay life in Senegal
Nothing works: The End of Everything, by John M. Harrison, reviewed
Set in ‘one of the well-known seasonal waterside art towns of Kent’, Harrison’s novel is both a bracing vision of environmental collapse and a post-Brexit cri de coeur
Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
An American archivist, hired to catalogue an elderly baronessa’s antiques, finds himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures in the Italian countryside
