Books
The cheapest, deadliest weapon
Nothing prepared Antony Beevor for this devastating exposé of the systematic use of rape in war and ethnic cleansing
Going round in circles
Some years ago I participated in a late-night Radio 3 show on exploration and travel. When I left the studio…
Can we have a pet instead?
When you’re not a mother it’s hard to imagine what motherhood is like. Anyone you know who becomes one assures…
Completely unhinged
Faced with Marina Lewycka’s new novel, it’s tempting to say that The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid…
Period piece
There’s something — isn’t there? — of the literary also-ran about Graham Swift. He was on Granta’s first, influential Best…
An Ethiopian Exodus
Menachem Begin was Israel’s most reviled and misunderstood prime minister. Reviled by Britain for his paramilitary activities against the British…
The prize of the skies
The art of falconry is more than 3,000 years old and possibly as popular now as at any time. Its…
The great taboo-breaker
In 1983 I was sent to New York to interview Johnny Rotten and I took the opportunity to call on…
Not a party person
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…
The inside story
As an inmate, Chris Atkins discovered just how violent and chaotic prison life is. His diaries highlight a national scandal – and the dangerous incompetence of the Ministry of Justice, says Will Heaven
A princely paragon
This is a giant Teutonic forest of a book, to be progressed through with determination as if by seasoned infantry;…
The mesh of life
Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s impressive third novel Weather, is ‘enmeshed’ with her brother, according to her psychologist-cum-meditation teacher.…
Don’t judge an album by its cover
Everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no front man, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic…
The restless spirit of the Enlightenment
Emily Thomas is a distinguished academic philosopher who has ‘spent a lot of time by herself getting lost around the…
Raw reality TV
The context for The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermes’s new satirical novel, is not as far-fetched as all that.…
Back to the future
Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries…
The white man’s a burden
The scope of Petina Gappah’s impressive novel is laid out in the prologue: the death of the Victorian explorer David…
The world’s melting pot
Every history of London — and there have been very many — has looked at the importance for the city…
A feminist awakening
For those of us with nagging doubts about the value of literary biography, books that show the biographer at work…
Love lies bleeding
Dear Life arrives at a time when the public appetite for the personal accounts of medical insiders shows no sign…
Tales of the Underground
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel transports us to antebellum Virginia, when the tobacco wealth of years gone by is dwindling, due…
Out of order
In his autobiography, John Bercow takes his peerage as a given. But that might be scuppered by accusations of bullying, says Lynn Barber
Escape into war
What compelled three well-known British writers to leave their homes and travel 6,000 miles to participate in a nasty late-19th-century…
Cooking up miracles
Georgina Landemare cooked for the Churchill family in all their kitchens, during the 1930s and 1940s. She got as close…
Crowning glories
When an American describes a woman as wearing a ‘Park Avenue Helmet’ you know exactly what is meant. This is…
