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We are all mysteries
‘Reading is a celebration of the mystery of ourselves,’ according to Elizabeth Strout, who writes to help readers understand themselves…
Hustlers and hoodlums
For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place…
The grandest dame
Eileen Atkins belongs to a singular generation of British actresses, among them Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Sian Phillips and Vanessa…
A devilish assignment
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Nature in the round
As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…
Pernicious patriarchy
UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…
A delicate bargain
This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…
Speed and stealth
Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…
Strength through adversity
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
Chasing nostalgia
The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified…
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles
These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond…
Unkindly light
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
In two minds
Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal.…
An inner pilgrimage
When E. Nesbit published Wet Magic in 1913 (a charming novel in which the children encounter a mermaid), she took…
A slippery slope
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
A world full of noises
The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop…
Dust to dust
Anyone with a grasp of the history of Britain knows that its once considerable power, and much of its still…
Flight into danger
Flying has always attracted chancers and characters to Africa. Wilbur Smith’s father so loved aviation he named his son to…
The Covid blame game
Are you ready to relive 2020? That’s what Adam Tooze is offering as he tells the story of Covid-19 through…
Driven to abstraction
If Modernism is a jungle, how do you navigate a path through its thickets? Some explorers — Peter Gay and…
The preoccupations of a poet
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
A cultivated mystique
It is 1158. A 17-year-old girl, born of both rape and royal blood, is cast out of the French court…
The war that changed the world
It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…
A family pilgrimage
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
