More from Books
Plantagenet wives
Alison Weir’s study of five Plantagenet queens is dominated by Isabella, the wife of Edward II, whose vengefulness led to the Hundred Years’ War
Blisters and squelch
Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, was a genuine phenomenon. Having been evicted from their farm after 20 years,…
Pride and joy
Since 2011, black Africans have been the dominant black group in the UK. Many of them are the descendants of…
Gluttons for punishment
Nick Hornby yokes the two in an enjoyable jeu d’esprit – but, apart from troubled childhoods and prodigious energy, the thing they really share is Hornby’s admiration
Sticky subjects
Queasy nostalgia gives way to mounting anger in a satirical novel about post-war Britain, seen through the eyes of a Birmingham family
Baby talk
Infant twin girls, in the first year of their lives, muse on everything from the futility of existence to the purpose of memory
Ruthless efficiency
George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories…
Sail away from the safe harbour
Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too,…
We are all stardust
It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that…
The horrors of lynching
Percival Everett’s 22nd novel The Trees was that rare thing on this year’s Booker shortlist: a genre novel. Only which…
No more Mr Nice Guy
Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said,…
From mystery cult to mass movement
Mutilated, strangled, suffocated or beaten to death: these are just some of the methods used to get rid of popes…
‘As capricious as a wild mare’
In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…
It’s all go in Wormingford
Ronald Blythe, the celebrated author of Akenfield, is to turn 100 next month, and to mark his centenary a beguiling…
Shock and awe
‘Astonish me!’ was the celebrated demand that the impresario Sergei Diaghilev made of Jean Cocteau when he was devising Erik…
The less said the better
Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in…
Mitfordian mischief
It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…
A Tuscan gem
Siena, the jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened…
Our understanding disability
This book reveals one man’s determination to enable his brother to live his best life. It is also a fable…
Among hawks and doves
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim,…
Three brave pioneers
The first three women doctors on the medical register in the UK had not only to study harder than their…
Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
Temples of delight
There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…
‘A really complicated person’
Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her…
Isolating with the ex
Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…
