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Where life is evil now
The idea of ‘pre-crime’ was popularised by Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Minority Report’ and the 2002 Steven Spielberg film…
True grit
In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales…
Smoking muskets and flashing daggers
The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on…
Gardening for pleasure and instruction
On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some…
The trouble with Auntie
An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely…
Change or decay
Climate change may be the central challenge of our century, but almost all attention has focused on its consequences for…
The least Soviet-friendly artist imaginable
The KGB might not have known much about modern art, but they knew what they liked. For instance, at what…
We were warned
Her name has faded, but the British author and editor Kay Dick once cut a striking figure. She lived in…
Shades of the prison house
For Jean-Paul Dubois, as for Emily Dickinson, ‘March is the month of expectation’. A prolific writer, he limits his literary…
GHB and GBH
Never, never kill the dog. It’s rule one in the crime writer’s manual. Cats are bad enough, as I can…
What the Georgians did for us
‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when…
Looking on the bright side
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a…
The secret seven
Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate…
Into the woods
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the…
Neither free nor easy
The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his…
One who didn’t get away
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his…
Keys to the future
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One…
Cooking up a storm
What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers.…
Confused lives
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
All human life is here
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The new immortals
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk…
Magical mystery tour
At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon.…
An abiding evil
The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore…
Man of honour
On 8 April 1864 an Austrian archduke with a penchant for daydreaming agreed to be emperor of Mexico. As Edward…
