Books

How Enoch Powell fancied himself Viceroy of India — and other startling revelations

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and…

Rorke’s Drift: a desperate brawl at a mission station up there with the great battle honours of the British army

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat: the triumph of Rorke’s Drift

19 January 2019 9:00 am

On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement: On this…

Steel Pulse perform at a concert organised by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League at Victoria Park, Hackney in 1978.

How Eric Clapton’s racism sparked a musical revolution

19 January 2019 9:00 am

On 13 August 1977, a demonstration by the National Front was routed in the streets of Lewisham by thousands of…

Teffi’s satire was always on target, but she balanced it with compassion

The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…

Is the threat of capital punishment really the foundation of good behaviour?

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems…

Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…

Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…

It’s all about the owners. The unwavering belief in Leicester City of the late, much loved Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha contributed hugely to its Premier League triumph in the 2015–2016 season

Pitches in the boardroom: football’s future assured

19 January 2019 9:00 am

This is a story of resurrection. A mere three decades ago, club football in England was a professional game largely…

Investigative journalists: new crime fiction reviewed

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller,…

‘Arise Hungarians, your country calls you!’ The poet Sandor Petofi declaims the famous ‘Talpra Magyar’ on 15 March 1848. Lajos Kossuth stands to the right

Hungary is being led once again down a dangerous nationalistic path

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Norman Stone has already written, with a brilliant blend of humour, understanding and scepticism, histories of the Eastern Front, Turkey,…

Detail of ‘Penn’s Treaty with the Indians’ by Benjamin West. Though William Penn was celebrated for his humane treatment of Native Americans, his heirs swindled the Lenape out of a million acres of territory

Should William Penn be shaking in his grave?

12 January 2019 9:00 am

The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a…

Yoko Ono in the Dakota building, on the first anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. Credit: Getty Images

Partying with John and Yoko: The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts…

Credit: Getty Images

Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…

Some artists talk for hours unprompted. Others, such as Patrick Caulfield (above), find the simplest question often difficult to answer

It’s a lifetime of hard work being an artist

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found…

Credit: Getty Images

Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…

Credit: Getty Images

Make it a new year’s resolution to be less active

12 January 2019 9:00 am

As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of…

‘The conclusion of the 18 October demonstration’

Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution

12 January 2019 9:00 am

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…

Credit: Getty Images

Catchwords for today — what’s in, what’s out

12 January 2019 9:00 am

The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David…

When William I’s bloody conquest came to an end, it was his coronation in London, on Christmas Day 1066, that sealed it

What did the Romans ever do for London?

12 January 2019 9:00 am

When Bishop Guy of Amiens looked across the Channel in the 11th century he saw ‘teeming London [which] shines bright.…

Chigozie Obioma. Credit: Jason Keith.

An Igbo Paradise Lost: An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man…

Credit: Getty Images

Life and death in 1970s Belfast: For the Good Times, by David Keenan, reviewed

12 January 2019 9:00 am

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that…

Francis Bacon in front of his triptych at the Galerie Claude Bernard in the Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1977

France gets a taste for Bacon

12 January 2019 9:00 am

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…

Credit: Getty Images

In Epping Forest’s dark undergrowth

12 January 2019 9:00 am

In this current era of identity politics and a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality amongst a younger generation,…

Of the people

12 January 2019 9:00 am

This must be the first occasion when a book on politics, written in Australia, has  been listed among the year’s…

‘The Break-up of the Ice’ by Claude Monet

How Calouste Gulbenkian became the richest man in the world

5 January 2019 9:00 am

Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to…