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From pirates to princes
The Normans had an astonishingly good run. Not only did they take over England in 1066, of course, but they…
Family misfortunes
The journalist and broadcaster Christina Patterson’s memoir begins promisingly. She has a talent for vivid visual description, not least: ‘We…
The four billion people question
Demographers are attached to their theories. The field’s most enduring is the ‘demographic transition’, whereby modernisation inexorably lowers a society’s…
Ways of escape
The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative…
True devotion
The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more…
Britain’s inglorious war
Despite prostrate Germany’s need for the return of its men, in Britain we didn’t release our prisoners of war until…
Dreaming of escape
‘The drawer beside Roberta’s bed contained remnants of other people’s fun’: so begins ‘Mathematics’, one of 11 stories in this…
The paths that lead to truth
The dust jacket of The Matter With Things quotes a large statement from an Oxford professor: ‘This is one of…
The time of our lives
The long 1990s began with the Pixies album Surfer Rosa in 1989 and ended with the invasion of Iraq in…
A game of life and death
No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant…
The past is ever present
‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins TheLong Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if…
Time to sit and stare
In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche made a complaint about the modern world, writing in The Gay Science: Even now one is…
The beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
And on it goes
A question looms throughout this book: is it better to die rather than experience the wrath of a publicly shamed…
Once upon a time in the South
To write a first novel of 800 pages is either supremely confident or crazy. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a professor of…
The great divide
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
Mirror of distortion
Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the…
Autocrat and autodidact
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Sly and saucy
At last, and finally: literary sex is back. The Bad Sex Prize has a lot to answer for in British…
Hopes and fears
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
Senses sent awry
Jesus is a Malteser. You might say I’m a liar or accuse me of the most egregious heresy, but the…
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…
