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Afghanistan’s lost hope
Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated…
Seeing red
After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two…
Addicted to love
Ruth, the narrator of Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is both the child of a single mother and a single mother…
More than a club
Even against our better judgment we tend to imbue our sporting heroes with characteristics they may not possess. This can…
From Holy Mother to Black Dragon
The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel…
Everyday matters
Many would say the commute was one thing they didn’t miss in lockdown. But when Lauren Elkin was ‘yanked out…
Hope springs eternal
What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question…
Weaving stories
What are myths for? Do they lend meaning and value to this quintessence of dust? Like religion, perhaps they help…
A woman in the shadows
When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her…
His true calling
We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or…
Boys who never grew up
I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is…
Darkness and desolation
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…
No stone left unturned
In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives…
It all streams past
To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
The vast majority of the British public, and even military historians, have never heard of them. COPPists — a combination…
Effortless superiority
It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White…
Feat of clay
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
A ridge too far?
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been…
Anything goes
When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of…
Spirit of place
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…
Souls for sale
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Prophet of disenchantment
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
