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An empire crumbles
Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this…
‘He couldn’t help being a bit surreal’
Love him or loathe him, Lucian Freud was a maverick genius whose life from the off was as singular as…
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
Only one half of the story
As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as…
Happiness is a warm gun
‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of…
For the chop
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi,…
Back on the road again
Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you…
Who’s pursuing a vendetta?
Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…
The roll-call of the damned
In a classic paradox of bureaucracy, the Index of Forbidden Books only really hit its stride when its original task…
Mad men plotting
Fifteen years ago, A.M. Homes published The Mistress’s Daughter, an explosive, painful account of how she met her birth mother,…
A home between worlds
When asked what it is we do, translators often resort to metaphors. We liken the act of translation to performing…
Roundheads on the run
When Charles II became king of England in 1660, he pardoned most of those who’d committed crimes during the civil…
You eat what you see
Farmer, restaurateur, critic, foodie activist, traveller (he’s worked in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa), cookery book writer, longtime TV…
The mutterings of the dead
Ten years ago Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel, Chinaman, was published and I raved about it, as did many others. Set…
The indispensable impresario
‘What exactly is it you do?’ asked a bamboozled King Alfonso XIII of Spain upon meeting Sergei Diaghilev at a…
A sadder and a wiser man
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
A shameful betrayal
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
Natalie Haynes has been compared with Mary Renault, the historical novelist who scandalised readers in the 1950s with her unflinching…
Musicals with a message
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and…
Into thin air
John Keay has for many years been a key historian and prolific contributor to the romance attaching to the highest…
Conflict in the Highlands
On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just…
He never looked back again
In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes…
Firmly in the picture
At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…
Bittersweet memories
This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…
Second chances
To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…
