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A call to farms
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood.…
Of man and misery
Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel,…
Uncovering the female past
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s…
Grim prospects ahead
We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and…
The outlaw river
It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length…
Siege mentality
Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts…
A death-haunted city
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Hysterical accusations
‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go…
Movers and shakers
Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…
The virtue of restraint
Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’…
Going the whole hog
A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…
Wolves in sheep’s clothing
To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature…
Escape from drudgery
Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…
A shared mission
The concept of vaccination evolved from 18th-century inoculation practices and many people contributed to the accretion of knowledge. This book…
All roads lead to Dublin
I do not think I am alone in confessing that I had read critical works on James Joyce before I…
A very tangled web
Vanessa Salomon is an internationally successful translator. Clever, beautiful, privileged – ‘born in a trilingual household: French, English and money’…
The great arbitrator
‘The law,’ according to W.S. Gilbert’s Lord Chancellor, ‘is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent’ and, by common consent,…
Remember forget-me-nots?
‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…
The lady vanishes
This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human…
A real game changer
The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC…
The horror unfolds
No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what…
No blame, no shame
If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…
The power and the glory
Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book…
The wild, wide fen
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
An interplay of voices
Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…
