Books
The time of our lives
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
The voice of a generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Constitutional rights and wrong
No one can accuse Linda Colley of shying away from big subjects. This one is as big as they come…
What it is to be English
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
Gardening frenzy
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
The scholar and the gypsy
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
The weekend cottage in the woods
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
The parent trap
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
Cat on hot bricks
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
‘A second-class racism’
The comic David Baddiel has written a book which explains that much of the far left hates Jews. There are…
Black mischief
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
The first industrial war
This book does not mess about. It tells the story of the fighting on the Western Front between 1914 and…
Five intrepid women
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
From temples to labyrinths
At a certain point, the critic Robert Hughes once noted, at the heart of American cities churches began to be…
Stark, intense honesty
Philip Roth was prepared to stare the soul resolutely in the face – and for that he can be forgiven most things, says David Baddiel
New-found freedom
In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more…
Man about the house
I have enjoyed many of Alan Warner’s previous novels, so it gives me no pleasure to report that his new…
A washing of hands
In 1866, the Russian historian Alexander Popov made an astonishing discovery. Leafing through a Renaissance Slavonic translation of the first-century…
A passion for pots
The use of ‘Ceramic’ rather than ‘Ceramics’ in the title of this book indicates Paul Greenhalgh’s passionate belief that ‘ceramic…
Small things misbehaving
Helgoland is a craggy German island in the North Sea. Barely bigger than a few fields, it reaches high above…
Nag, nag, nag
What an awful title. Something we hacks are forever saying (along with ‘Make mine a double’ and ‘Is it still…
Cycle of pain
Suffering from post-traumatic stress and the effects of government austerity measures, Paul Jones resigned as the head of an inner-city…
The Mean One
We have all become Paul Kagame’s useful idiots, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Celebrity gangster
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
One who got away
Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the…
