More from Books
Mozart the infant prodigy was also a child of the Enlightenment
‘My dear young man: don’t take it too hard,’ Joseph II counsels a puppyish Mozart, the colour of his hair…
Barbara Amiel is a cross between Medusa and Maria Callas
If this book becomes a Netflix blockbuster, as it surely must, Barbara Amiel presents us with an opening image. She…
How we laughed: the golden days of Bananarama
Saying you don’t like Bananarama is like saying you don’t like summer or Marilyn Monroe — a sure sign of…
Labyrinthine tales: We All Hear Stories in the Dark, by Robert Shearman, reviewed
When the estimable Andy Miller, the host of the Backlisted podcast, recommended a new collection of short stories on Twitter,…
Christiaan Huygens – hero of time and space
This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The…
The map as a work of art
’Tis the season of complacency, when we sit in warmth and shiver vicariously with Mary and Joseph out in the…
The Enlightenment was a many-splendoured thing
History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War,…
All change: The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads,…
What is so special about heavy metal?
Ever since my early youth I have loved, followed and respected a certain music genre that some people consider strange,…
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising
‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty,…
Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure
Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so…
Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours
A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we…
James Kelman’s ‘Memoirs’ are a misnomer
James Kelman doubtless remains best known for his 1994 Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late and…
The serious business of graphic novels
One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…
Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family
If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…
Who killed Jane Britton in 1969?
The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.…
No one ‘got’ the Sixties better than David Bailey
What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer…
Bright and beautiful: the year’s best art books reviewed
When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ —…
The plight of the migrant: Crossed Lines, by Marie Darrieussecq, reviewed
‘We should be living in a brave country and on a brave planet that bravely distributes its occupants,’ thinks Rose…
The British Empire is now the subject on which the sun never sets
Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes…
Is there anything left worth joking about?
Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One…
No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…
When sedition was rife in 18th-century London
Researching the seditious literature of earlier periods is seldom suspenseful, pulse-quickening work. For every thrill of archival discovery, there are…
An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed
Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the…
