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Monster bunch
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
More him than her
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Russia’s sacred tree
The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…
A small miracle
Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful…
The story of O
Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for…
Playing cat and mouse
Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an…
Crazy cricket
Cricket in Latin America sounds like an oxymoron. Yet in almost every country in the region willow was hitting leather…
More sinned against than sinning
Ethel Rosenberg was an exceptional woman. Born with a painful curvature of the spine to a poor family of Jewish…
Words were not enough
Before Billy Wilder became the celebrated director of films such as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment…
Gossip abounds
In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’…
Lashings of irony
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Only half the story
One of the more surreal conversations I have had with a musical hero of mine came in 2017 when I…
Community spirit
The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict…
Mothers and daughters
A new novel by Esther Freud — her ninth — raises the perennial but always fascinating question about the use…
Bad blood
In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45.…
Across the universe
‘Peace — slept for 14 hours. The roar of the sea slashing the rocks — is there any more soothing…
The turning point of the war
If you can tell the difference between Jack Hawkins and John Mills, and between a Stuka and a Sten gun,…
The road to hell
In the 1930s, a group of American airmen had a dream. Air power, they believed, would do away with the…
The state we’re in
As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and…
A battle of wits
Rapid technological advance, a dark underworld of uncensored publishing, a threatened rupture with Scotland, even fears of a new outbreak…
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…
