More from Books
From pike-and-pitchfork brigade to crack militia: ‘Dad’s Army’ wasn’t so ludicrous after all
Sinclair McKay traces the gradual evolution of the Home Guard into what one colonel described as ‘the best trained and equipped force of its kind in the history of our country’
No one is ordinary: The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed
Writing about the inner lives and struggles of small-town characters, Strout reminds us that we are all battling something, even if we don’t broadcast it
Is coffee-drinking the new secular religion?
In a whimsical discussion of our relationship with the beverage, Julian Baggini proposes ‘Coffeeism’ as a philosophy for everyday life
They shoot horses: Boyhood, by David Keenan, reviewed
Two young Glaswegians revenge themselves on the men who assaulted them at a nightclub by murdering one of them and killing their herd of horses
The exquisitely dull life of Elizabeth II, expert on cap badges
‘I spend most of my life conversing with strangers’, admitted the late Queen, hosting endless receptions, launching ships, taking salutes and pinning medals on civic worthies
Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun?
Hugh Trevor-Roper, for whom the university was a place of pleasure as well as learning, identifiedas early as 1951 a ‘party of darkness’ focusing on administrative efficiency and dullness
How Syria’s dream of freedom ended in further repression
Anand Gopal traces events through the lives of six rebels, from the first stirrings against Assad to the latest protests against corruption
The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked
Robert Courtine, the revered food critic and Le Monde columnist for four decades, turns out to have been a devotee of Hitler and ferocious anti-Semite
A foolproof way of predicting the future
Nostradamus’s prophecies are so poetic that they can be taken to foretell almost anything, while the American clairvoyant Jeane Dixon also managed to cover every possibility
In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction
Using his life as a case study, Brian Dillon sets out to demonstrate that education is just as much about questioning things as it is about obtaining answers
The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed
A bullied eight-year-old forms a bond with his caring, middle-aged neighbour in a heartbreaking novel of modern America’s underclass
The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity
Holly E.J. Black highlights the differences between the feathery delicacy of an etching, the bold forms of a linocut and the carved sinews of an ancient woodblock
A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed
In a short, glittering novel, Lerner shows how the factual is always infused with the fictional as he explores the tension between the given and the constructed
Weeds, bugs and lichens must now thrill the imagination
Muted, scrubby grasslands rather than rolling green fields are what excite the naturalist John Wright – and the buzz of stinging insects
Haunting images: The Shadow of the Object, by Chloe Aridjis, reviewed
With its eerie slides portraying the long dead, a magic lantern becomes a focus for the novel’s understated meditation on mortality
A portrait of the fin de siècle in all its morbid decadence
Matthew Sturgis leads us into a sultry, incense-laden world where Death itself nurses a sinister preference for the young
The potentially catastrophic consequences of reading Kafka
Maia Hrushka wonders rhetorically whether translating The Trial into Italian left Primo Levi fatally depressed
The nightmare of filming A Hard Day’s Night
Hours of footage were lost in the mayhem caused by teenage fans, while even adults ‘descended like flies’ to snatch as souvenirs anything the Beatles had touched
Why it’s permissible to betray family secrets
In his A-Z of life writing, Blake Morrison reassures the wannabe memoirist that ‘when a writer is born into a family, that family will have an afterlife’
Alone on a vast fjord, surrounded by whales, beneath the midnight sun
A devotee of the kayak, David Gange delights in paddling small boats in the Faroes, Norway, Greenland, Newfoundland and the Caribbean
Antony Gormley’s lonely figures transfer to paper
Many drawings depict a single male in a featureless environment or emerging as though from a Rorschach blot
Farewell to the Calloways: See You on the Other Side, by Jay McInerney, reviewed
The final volume of the tetralogy sees the once glamorous literary couple now adrift in New York as the mood changes with Covid, #MeToo and identity politics
An outpouring of jaunty black comedy
Whether reportage or dashed down diary entries, Xandra Bingley’s vivid stories seem to catch life on the wing as it flashes past at terrifying speed
Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved
Relegated to a servants’ hall soon after it was finished, the double portrait ‘Pink and Blue’ may have been caught up in a swirl of rumours about its subjects’ mother
Unravelling the infinite mysteries of physics
DeepMind’s brilliant co-founder Demis Hassabis hopes to ‘create a machine that can occupy a position in the cosmos once ascribed to an all-powerful divinity’
