Books
Coach, politician and agony aunt
When I picked this book up, I already loved it — or at least I loved the idea of it:…
Telling tall tales
‘I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first…
Eat your heart out, Holden Caulfield
Tim Winton’s novel about a journey of teenage male self-discovery is raw, brutal and merciless. You need to be familiar…
Conan Doyle for the Defence tells the fascinating story of Britain’s ‘Dreyfus’
One day in December 1908, a wealthy 81-year-old spinster named Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her Glasgow flat.…
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
Foreign bodies galore: the best new crime fiction
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more…
Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…
Staggering to Jerusalem — a journey from darkness into light
Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The…
Has Tibet finally lost out to China?
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover…
The modern celebrity silk: Geoffrey Robertson ticks all the boxes
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…
The great outdoors is a short walk from your front door
When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…
A Weekend in New York, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer —…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get…
A love letter to the short story
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a…
The industrial kling-klang of ‘Krautrock’
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones…
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become,…
How Steven Spurrier enraged the French — and was never forgiven
Fine wine rarely makes it into the public consciousness, but one event in 1976 has proved of perennial interest: the…
From Don Quixote to My Struggle — a survey of the novel in 160 pages
I wonder what your idea of a good novel is. Does it embody the attributes of solid plotting, characterisation and…
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…
Death-defying acts and the dark side of the circus
In 2013 Tessa Fontaine joined up with the World of Wonders, a circus sideshow that travels around the United States…
Swept away by Hitler’s charisma: German women gush over the Führer
The distinguished historian Konrad Jarausch’s new book is a German narrative, told through the stories of ordinary people who lived…
Dickens and Agatha Christie made my childhood bearable
Girl with Dove is a memoir by Sally Bayley, a writer who teaches at Oxford University, of growing up in…
