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Making scientific history
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
Musical misfits
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Foreign corners that are forever England
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Harping on the past
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
Half blind to the world
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
A very Irish tragedy
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
Riding the feedless horse
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dark days in Hollywood
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Mystic multitudes
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
This other Eden
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
How to see off the grumps
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
Friction and fieldwork
To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
The Everybody Inn
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
Tudorbethan hell
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
The not-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
Sweet and sour
Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they…
The only gay in the village
In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set…
