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Words take wing
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
Secrets of the double cross
Für dich, Tommy, ist der Krieg vorbei. However, many British servicemen, officers especially, didn’t want their war to be over.…
The mask of deception
Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives…
Breakdown in Berlin
‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from…
Blood and lust
In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The…
Between heaven and Charing Cross
After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly…
Opposites attract
Babysitters are having a literary moment. Following Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age, Nick Hornby is the latest author…
Bloodbath in Rome
It’s not as if Julius Caesar wasn’t warned about the Ides of March. Somebody thrust a written prediction of the…
Formal, but fluid
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a…
Other men’s wars
‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at…
A meditation on love
The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…
Worlds of their own
Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the…
An ‘unremarkable’ Nazi
In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It…
A cat for Kit
Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…
Things go flying
There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists…
Science and religion intertwine
We can probably blame George and Ira Gershwin. It was that brilliant duo who, in 1937, penned the memorable lyric…
The front line of hell
Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was…
Fish out of water
In the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans paint images of salmon on to stones. They say that if you rub those…
A novel sort of novel
Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens,…
Cooking up a storm
You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration…
In and out of the magic circle
Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell’s diaries for The Spectator, I concluded as follows: Who will be the chroniclers of…
Years in the wilderness
When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a…
Worth doing badly
The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m…
Nothing special, nothing new
I have a book of essays from 1986 by a group of British and American scholars called The Special Relationship.…
Into the labyrinth
Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut…
