More from Books

Bribery and betrayal

14 October 2023 9:00 am

The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is portrayed as a Vicar of Bray figure, all too ready to change allegiances in one of the most volatile periods of English history

Has crypto finally had its day?

14 October 2023 9:00 am

It was a born of a specific macroclimate of low interest rates following the global financial crisis – but all that is melting away and, in the case of crypto, not before time

The crimes of Le Corbusier

14 October 2023 9:00 am

We can all sympathise with his desire to end bad, ugly new building, but too many of his own projects have had to be scrapped for functional reasons

Ravenous rats

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Surprisingly for a novel riffing on Orwell’s dystopia, Julia is portrayed as a cheerful young woman uninterested in politics and believing in nothing at all

Everyday life in the Eternal City: Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri, reviewed

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Each story circles around events both big and small, such as lunch at a simple trattoria, a birthday party, a summer holiday or the funeral of a friend

Robyn Davidson explores yet another foreign country – the past

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Now in her seventies, the travel writer returns to her childhood in Australia, and the trauma of losing her mother at the age of 11

Murder by the Mississippi

14 October 2023 9:00 am

When the mutilated corpse of a Ku Klux Klan member is discovered, the stability of an entire city is threatened in this tale of racial tension set beside the Mississippi

Set in a silver sea: the glory of Britain’s islands

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Alice Albinia reminds us that Orkney was a trading station long before London, Iona the epicentre of Celtic Christianity and Shetland a haven for liberal Udal law

We should all embrace the power of games

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Board games especially – dating back to at least 3000 BC – have never been idle entertainment but help boost the memory and teach valuable strategic skills

Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success

14 October 2023 9:00 am

The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’

Out of the shadows

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Unlike his attention-seeking brother David Stirling, Bill was a careful planner, responsible for many successful intelligence-gathering operations behind enemy lines

Remember, remember

7 October 2023 9:00 am

The world that blossoms in this haunting novel about the importance of memory is in the aesthetic vein known as ‘mono no aware’, or ‘the pathos of things’

Looking on the bright side

7 October 2023 9:00 am

The Rochdale lass who sang her way from music hall to the silver screen encouraged a spirit of resilience and community in the interwar years, says Simon Heffer

What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Ingrid Swenson spent ten years retrieving discarded shopping lists at a London Waitrose, and the result is a rare glimpse into entire, private worlds

The difficulties faced by identical twins

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Being the genetic copy of another human not only presents problems of individuality but offers a ‘rare form of experimental control’, says William Viney

Gentle genius

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Dissatisfied with his unfinished epic, the dying Vergil called for his scrolls to be burned, but was fortunately overruled by the Emperor Augustus

An absolute earful

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening

Stark realities

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Lawyers, teachers, architects and engineers all enjoy sex behind the scenes at a Houston gay bar in a novel focusing on relationships among black urban men

Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

7 October 2023 9:00 am

Contemplating ‘hedgehog philosophy’ with Sarah Sands, Rowan Williams, Greta Thunberg and other luminaries would test anyone’s patience after 150 pages

Blow your mind

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The UK seems on the brink of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ – but, stripped of shamanic ritual and sanitised for medicinal purposes, will psilocybin retain its power?

Is Israelophobia the latest form of anti-Semitism?

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The demonisation of the state of Israel is basically an anti-Semitic mutation ‘evolving out of reach’, argues Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle

Fighting every inch of the way: the Italian Campaign of 1943

30 September 2023 9:00 am

When Allied forces landed at Salerno on 9 September, they expected an easy run to Rome. But the intelligence proved dangerously faulty, as James Holland explains

Rising star

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The second volume of Knausgaard’s trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body

A horrifying glimpse of Syria’s torture cells

30 September 2023 9:00 am

More than 100 interviews with surviving detainees and former prison workers reveal how profoundly shocking President Assad’s regime continues to be

Never the doctor, always the nurse: the fate of women in post-war Britain

30 September 2023 9:00 am

For decades, undereducated girls were thwarted before they even started in the workplace, living in the slipstream of men and drip-fed with a sense of their own uselessness