More from Books
Not so dryasdust: how 18th-century antiquarians proved the first ‘modern’ historians
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Leni Riefenstahl is missing: The Dictator’s Muse, by Nigel Farndale, reviewed
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
A lesson in understanding serial killers and child molesters
True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the…
Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
The strangest landscapes are close to home
This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so…
Sweet and sour: Barcelona Dreaming, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
We’ve embraced William Blake without having any idea of what he was on about
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
A load of oddballs: the eccentricities of past cricketing heroes
For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a…
Journey to the end of the world: the full horror of the Belgica’s Antarctic expedition
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure:…
In search of Great-Aunt Pearl’s will: a black comedy of familial strife
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
The sexploits of Mariella Novotny
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Pure, white and native: the birch as a symbol of Russian nationalism
The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…
A hymn to the hummingbird — one of the most astonishing organisms on Earth
Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful…
O father, where art thou? Fox Fires, by Wyl Menmuir, reviewed
Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for…
Secret treaties and games of cat and mouse: a choice of recent crime fiction
Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an…
Snakes alive! Playing cricket in Latin America
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather…
The great betrayal of Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
Billy Wilder — the making of a great film director
Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment…
Brightest of the Bright Young People: the rich, rackety life of Cecil Beaton
In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’…
A smart take on literary London: Dead Souls, by Sam Riviere, reviewed
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Robert Thompson’s memoir is worth reading for the ‘Fairport years’ alone
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I…
