Books
Swirling meditations on language
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Escape into fantasy
The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie…
Decency personified
The life of Paul Ramsay shows that business people don’t have to be ruthless to succeed. Many will find this…
Driving force
Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten
The good, the bad and the ugly
Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they…
Criss cross
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
Empires strike back
From ancient times, empires have risen and fallen, driven by war, territorial acquisition, trade, plunder, religion, ideology, technology, culture and…
Small miracles
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…
Ghoulish entertainment
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
Fair women and brave men
History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Next year in Jerusalem
Alex Ryvchin’s book couldn’t possibly have come at a better time. On an almost daily basis, voices opposed to the…
Time immemorial
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not…
Trapped in hell
On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners…
Everyday exchanges
Conversation is a fascinating subject, says Philip Hensher – but very few people get it right
One who got away
In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life: Come all you brave boys, whose courage is…
The road to Weimar
Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until…
The lives of others
Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating…
Giving the game away
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a…
A troubled past
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…
Brains and beauty
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless…
Some like it hot
These days it is as hard to imagine Sichuanese food without chillies as it is to imagine Italian food without…
Models and bottles
The spectacular extravagance of the VIP nightclub ‘experience’ could be the last bonfire of the vanities, says Lynn Barber
Wheels on fire
Formula One motor racing is the perennial, worldwide contest that most reliably gratifies hero-worshipping, power-worshipping, money-worshipping, technology-worshipping ghouls, and some…
Will she, won’t she?
Publishers everywhere are looking for the new Sally Rooney, which is odd since as far as I know the old…
