More from Books
A right old song and dance
All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time,…
A principled pragmatist
A headline in the Mail on Sunday, taken up eagerly by the BBC’s Todayprogramme, claimed recently: ‘The SAS is getting…
Gorbachev’s failed experiment
Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was guttering to its close. Those of us who were there remember the exhilarating…
Losing direction
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant formed the most successful cinematic partnership since Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger. Between the founding…
From Sooki to Snoopy
It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing…
A beady eye
At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters…
The life of the party
Readers of this magazine will have enjoyed Joan Collins’s diaries, and her Past Imperfect was one of the funniest showbiz…
Animal magic
If one of the purposes of art is to help us see the world around us, then Sebastião Salgado’s photographs…
Kings of the dung heap
One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…
Is this the best we can hope for?
For all its faults and foibles, its busts and bailouts, modern market capitalism demonstrates a remarkably bullish resilience. We don’t…
Prophesying doom
Janine di Giovanni’s book begins in a Paris apartment during the first lockdown. She’s at a friend’s home, which she…
Sharing the vibe
On a Monday evening in May 1966, Paul McCartney and John Lennon visited a nightclub called Dolly’s in Jermyn Street.…
Doctors at sea
Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…
Lockdown creations
‘I may, one day, stop making notes and writing down recipes,’ Nigel Slater says in A Cook’s Book (Fourth Estate,…
Good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
Time and motion study
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
A cruel affliction
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
The best of the Stuarts
Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…
No fairytale
I once stood on a Dublin street with Shane MacGowan and watched little old ladies who can’t ever have been…
Fears of popery
Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of…
From nomads to emperors
This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted,…
Mawkish melodrama
Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark…
Death is rarely the end
In March 1963, the Fantastic Four had a fractious encounter with Spider-Man and a dust-up with the Hulk — a…
Do elephants dance?
It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that,…
‘A triumph of meandering’
Sara Wheeler 27 November 2021 9:00 am
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…