More from Books
The music of mindfulness
At George Harrison’s 1971 concert for Bangladesh, awkwardly, the audience applauded after Ravi Shankar and his musicians had paused to…
Courage of the ‘ghetto girls’
‘Jewish Resistance in Poland: Women Trample Nazi Soldiers,’ ran a New York headline in late 1942. That autumn, the Nazi…
Monsters and miracles
Mircea Cartarescu likens his native Romania to a Latin American country stranded in eastern Europe. Certainly, his writing delivers not…
The rising tide
In 2009 Margaret Atwood published The Year of the Flood, set in the aftermath of a waterless flood, a flu-like…
Trouble in store
What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there…
Otherworldly genius
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
Plumbing the depths
Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a…
Making holy war
When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America,…
The next big thing
Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…
History endlessly repeated
Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…
A blast from the past
Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill…
L and M
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…
Birds of a feather
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…
The bare essentials
Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’.…
A dog’s life
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly.…
Perfume and politics
This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt,…
The lives of mothers
There are few certainties in life. Death and taxes are the ones regularly trotted out. However, there is another that…
Flower power
Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive…
Promises, promises
Charles Péguy’s adage that everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics is sharply illustrated by the development of the…
Lectures with laughs
Dr Benzion Netanyahu’s reputation precedes him. ‘A true genius, who also happens to be a major statesman and political hero,’…
The city of the plains
‘Everyone knows the Alexandria in Egypt,’ writes Edmund Richardson, ‘but there were over a dozen more Alexandrias scattered across Alexander…
Boy racer
‘Who do you think you are — Stirling Moss?’ a genially menacing traffic cop would ask a hapless motorway transgressor.…
Six of the best
Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced…
Monstrous conceit
If you want to judge how much society has changed, you might do worse than visit a few secondhand bookshops.…
Visitations from Franco
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in…
