Books
Not so brutish
When I studied anthropology back in the early 1980s, Neanderthals were still largely the bulk-browed brutes of yore, grunting in…
Pirate principality
In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never…
Epic of gossip
Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the…
Forlorn hope
Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué…
Fools and fraudsters
In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the…
All things to all men
Britain’s two most famous legendary figures, King Arthur and Robin Hood, remain enduringly and endearingly elusive, and thus ever-fascinating: Arthur…
Going quietly mad
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…
The man who hunted himself
Graham Greene was constantly searching for peace of mind along with escapist thrills, says Nicholas Shakespeare
Waves of unrest
In 1798, Tipu Sultan of Mysore sent an embassy to Mauritius. At home, he had fought the British and seen…
A passion for collecting
Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from…
The time of our lives
Presumably because a small part of it takes place in Salford, the epigraph to Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel consists of…
Never a dull sentence
Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing…
The truth is difficult
‘I don’t at all hate lies,’ Elena Ferrante explained in Frantumaglia, her manifesto for authorial anonymity. ‘I find them useful…
A river runs through it
As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead,…
From slave to freedom fighter
Toussaint Louverture’s ‘crazy dream’ for Haiti has still to be realised, says Amy Wilentz
The house on the Heath
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Gimme shelter
In the Covid-19 crisis the calamity-howlers have found a vindication: go back to survival mode and bunker down because nobody…
Tears before bedtime
I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward…
Grim and resolute
Faber must take a rather dim view of British readers’ historical awareness these days. This is a biography of one…
Holiday washout
There is an old Yorkshire tale about a prosperous town which, legend has it, once stood on the site of…
Playing by his own rules
There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in…
John Bull at play
The history of English sport reflects a defiant people determined to protect their ancient prerogatives, says Alex Massie
Anatomy of fiction
By more than a mile the best book I have read during the pandemic is Tim Finch’s Peace Talks. It…
What really happened?
This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…
We want lies
On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a…
