Books
The ‘other’ other half
Conservative estimates place the number of those in America with more than one spouse as up to 100,000, but the…
The forsaken mermaid
Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual.…
All about Eve
On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from…
Was it ever a symbol of unity?
From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier…
A stranger to herself
How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this…
Grief fills the room up
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
A family in a billion
Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts.…
An unexamined life
Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his…
A true revolutionary
Wordsworth’s reputation has been too long in decline, says Tom Williams. In the space of a decade he transformed English poetry, and his earlier works remain astonishing
Flying too close to the sun
The beautiful Greek island of Hydra became home to a bohemian community of expats in the 1960s, including the Canadian…
The shape of things to come
To begin not at the beginning but at the end of the beginning. Or rather, to begin at another beginning,…
Fame is a fickle food
Good writing about celebrity is scant. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate…
A battleground for archaeologists
Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…
Creepy men everywhere
‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah,a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines…
Born to be wild
Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite…
Saviours of the world
Alan Johnson describes how four young men from Liverpool revived Britain, healed America and brought joy to millions
Trying not to get killed
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…
The bittersweet lure of the past
At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop…
An idyllic vision of the future
The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the…
Be not so fearful
Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend…
Where the soul sits alone
If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…
Strategies for survival
Late in his life, I asked my uncle René about his exploits in wartime France. What I knew was that…
The West is failing to rise to the challenge of coronavirus
Having apparently shaken off the first phase of the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine is now in…
A resounding success
Gustav Mahler was a passionate enthusiast for the colossal in music. Even so, his mighty eighth symphony stands apart, says Philip Hensher
Mad, bad and dangerous
Brian De Palma brings his film director’s eye to Are Snakes Necessary? (Hard Case, £16.99), written in collaboration with the…
