Books
![View of Marseille from the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, also known as La Bonne Mère, traditionally regarded as the city’s protectress. ‘The Good Mother intervenes at sick beds, down shadowy streets, and in the dark hours of night,’ writes Iain Sinclair [image: Getty]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Marseille.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
How do our surroundings affect our health and happiness?
The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a…
John Law: the Scottish gambler who rescued France from bankruptcy
John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was…
The personality test that conned the world
The other day in the Guardian’s Blind Date column, two participants, or victims, finished off an account of their frightful…
Hoping to find happiness: Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon…
How a faulty map led to the discovery of America
Reflecting on the genesis of Treasure Island, the adventure yarn that grew from a map of an exotic isle he…
All things lead to 9/11: An American Story, by Christopher Priest, reviewed
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s…
The scramble for the Middle East: Britain and America fall out
One of the many pleasures offered by Lords of the Desert, which narrates the rivalry between Britain and the United…
The body in the cellar: another grisly unsolved Victorian murder
Literary non-fiction demands that a respectable household is not really a respectable household — and the Bastendorffs of 4 Euston…
The sight of blue hydrangeas brings out the worst in Henri Cole
This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an…
The horrors of rewilding
This unusual book begins with an account of the author’s ten-year love affair with dairy farming and an attempt ‘to…
A paean to lesbian love: Aftershocks, by A.N. Wilson, reviewed
The polymath writer A.N.Wilson returns to the novel in Aftershocks, working on the template of the 2011 earthquake which devastated…
The scourge of Christian missionaries in British-Indian history
Objectivity seems to be difficult for historians writing about Britain’s long and complicated relationship with India, and this makes the…
The old man and his muse: Hemingway’s toe-curling infatuation with Adriana Ivancich
One rainy evening in December 1948, a blue Buick emerged from the darkness of the Venetian lagoon near the village…
The urge to purge: it’s closure at last for the tortured Karl Ove Knausgaard
And so it comes, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence: a pale brick of a book,…
A date with Venus in Tahiti
There is something about the Transit of Venus that touches the imagination in ways that are not all to do…
Busy beavers: in praise of man’s natural ally
The British experience of beavers is somewhat limited. Most of us haven’t been lucky enough to have spied an immigrant…
John Lilburne: champion of liberty and born belligerent
John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many…
On the run from Corunna: Now We Shall be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller, reviewed
There is only one Andrew Miller. In the 20 years since his debut novel Ingenious Pain won both the James…
How scary is dairy?
For tens of thousands of years, humans have been domesticating other mammals — cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, camels, llamas, donkeys,…
Caught between fascism and witchcraft: All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed
All Among the Barley, Melissa Harrison’s third ‘nature novel’, centres on Wych Farm in the autumn of 1933, where the…
Modernist architecture isn’t barbarous – but the blinkered rejection of it is
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest…
Glenda Jackson might have made a magnificent Hamlet
The role of Hamlet is, Max Beerbohm famously wrote, ‘a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later,…
Will all whales soon be extinct?
Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not…
Too much American angst: the latest short stories reviewed
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M.…
The translator and spy: two sides of the same coin
Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically…
