More from Books
Chasing nostalgia
The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified…
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles
These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond…
Unkindly light
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
In two minds
Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal.…
An inner pilgrimage
When E. Nesbit published Wet Magic in 1913 (a charming novel in which the children encounter a mermaid), she took…
A slippery slope
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
A world full of noises
The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop…
Dust to dust
Anyone with a grasp of the history of Britain knows that its once considerable power, and much of its still…
Flight into danger
Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to…
The Covid blame game
Are you ready to relive 2020? That’s what Adam Tooze is offering as he tells the story of Covid-19 through…
Driven to abstraction
If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and…
The preoccupations of a poet
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
A cultivated mystique
It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court…
The war that changed the world
It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…
A family pilgrimage
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
The scramble for affluence
In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited…
The ever-changing scene
It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the…
Mann’s secret desires
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
A brainwave… or not
We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this…
In the heart of the night
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
An odd, unsettled time
The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old…
Eavesdropping on history
The famous photographic portrait by Karsh of Winston Churchill as wartime prime minster personifies heroic defiance and grim determination. His…
Always entertaining
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Life, love and alienation
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
