More from Books
Tongues will wag
One September day in 1649, in the frontier town of Springfield, Massachusetts, Anthony Dorchester returned from church to the house…
Thoroughly hooked
Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing…
Forging a new life
At Intelligent Life, the Economistmagazine where I worked for some years, it was easy to feel intellectually challenged. Even the…
A spiritual meditation
‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis.…
A fine finale
Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by…
Names, not numbers
If Joseph Stalin was right about one thing it was his assertion that ‘the death of one man is a…
God is everywhere
Twenty years ago The Corrections alerted a troubled world to the talents of Jonathan Franzen. Though cruel and funny and…
Perfect poise
The tide of survival bias has retreated and left the Anglepoise a design classic. Its contemporaries from the mid-1930s, a…
Nonny nonny no
As a writer who obsesses over the right title to grab a target audience, seeing a book subtitled ‘Song Collectors…
Witching times
In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned,…
Doors to the past
E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to…
The end of the affair
The story of the Cambridge spies has been served up so often that it has become stale — too detailed,…
We are all mysteries
‘Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,’ according to Elizabeth Strout, who writes to help readers understand themselves…
Hustlers and hoodlums
For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place…
The grandest dame
Eileen Atkins belongs to a singular generation of British actresses, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips and Vanessa…
A devilish assignment
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Nature in the round
As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…
Pernicious patriarchy
UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…
A delicate bargain
This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…
Speed and stealth
Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…
Strength through adversity
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
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…
