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Ode to LA
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
An imaginative interpretation of the past
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Where’s Leni?
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
Broadmoor tales
True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the…
Dishing the dirt
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
So near and yet so strange
This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so…
City of dreams
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
Sublime strangeness
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
A load of oddballs
For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a…
The second-worst journey in the world
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure:…
A will and a way
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Murder and a moral truth
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Top notes
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
A light crack of the whip
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
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…
