More from Books
The deserted village green: is this the end of cricket as we know it?
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…
Much-hyped technological innovation isn’t necessarily progress
Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…
Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…
Roger Scruton’s swan song: salvation through Parsifal
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…
Would you kill for a cup of coffee?
In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup…
Sadness and scandal: Hinton, by Mark Blacklock, reviewed
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…
How not to get away from it all in the Hebrides
Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not…
René Dreyfus: the racing driver detested by the Nazis
I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A…
Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?
It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached…
Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?
People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that…
When Idi Amin threatened to shoot the cook
Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about…
A Wiltshire mystery: A Saint in Swindon, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled,…
Short stories to enjoy in lockdown
In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust…
Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…
For Jack Tar, going to sea was the ultimate adventure
Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of…
Guilty pleasures that fail to satisfy: Cleanness, by Garth Greenwell, reviewed
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing…
How Brighton’s gangs became increasingly radicalised
Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes,…
A story of skill, courage and imagination: how Britain’s Sea Harriers stole victory against the odds
‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other…
Clean lines and dirty habits: the Modernists of 1930s Hampstead
With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always…
Arthur Jeffress: bright young person of the post-war art scene
The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but…
Alexandra Shulman’s unlikely career in fashion journalism should have made a Hollywood movie
Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her…
Mysteries of English village life: Creeping Jenny, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and…
There’s no single trick to making money — just resist a noble calling
‘Beauty is pain,’ the model Gigi Hadid asserts. She’s one of the successful, rich people quizzed by William Leith in…
Our rivers, as much as our oceans, are in urgent need of protection
Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers…
