Books
It wasn’t all laughs
Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it…
Top-level intelligence
The brilliance of GCHQ can now be recognised – and about time too, says Sinclair McKay
Legion of Babel
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Irritable male syndrome
By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the…
Dublin pub crawl
Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s…
On a knife-edge with Stanley
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
Words take wing
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
A walk on the Wilde side
Philip Hensher admires a witty account of the horrors of modern film-making
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…
Spells and bindings
Dennis Duncan enjoys some of the world’s most bizarre books
A playwright at play
Tom Stoppard is a non-stop genius of jokes – but many of them make his latest biographer uneasy, says Craig Raine
