More from Books
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…
Otherworldly genius
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
Plumbing the depths
Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a…
Making holy war
When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America,…
The next big thing
Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…
History endlessly repeated
Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…
A blast from the past
Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill…
L and M
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…
Birds of a feather
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…
The bare essentials
Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’.…
A dog’s life
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly.…
Perfume and politics
This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt,…
