Books
Zimbabwe’s chaotic history has at least produced some outstanding fiction
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s arresting Nervous Conditions appeared in 1988 and was the first novel published in English by a black Zimbabwean…
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
Whores of phwoar: women talking dirty
Jonathon Green is a tosher. As a lexicographer he dives into archives and emerges with armfuls of slangy curios, such…
The Tudor dynasty owed everything to Margaret Beaufort’s machinations
Of the clutch of female powerbrokers who emerged during the civil wars of the English 15th century, the diminutive figure…
Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort
A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the…
The deadly war game of the Battle of the Atlantic
My father served in the Royal Navy during the second world war. He drank over-proof rum and smoked unfiltered cigarettes,…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
The coldest war of all: sabotaging the Nazis in Norway
Anyone mildly interested in the second world war probably knows two things about our wartime alliance with Norway, following its…
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is a long, hard slog
The Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who sounds like a sneeze and reads like a fever, is on a mission to…
Why we’re all in love with Fleabag
Why would you need the scripts for Fleabag? It’s hardly a lost classic. It’s always popping up on BBC iPlayer.…
Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters
In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings…
You’d never believe what goes on in the Sainsbury’s car park
Psychogeography takes many forms: Sebaldian gravitas, Will Self’s provocative flash and dazzle and Iain Sinclair’s jeremiads for lost innocence. Gareth…
Robert the Bruce — master of guerrilla warfare
The story of Robert the Bruce runs from the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 to Robert’s own…
From frontispiece to endpapers: the last word on the book
Book Parts — hardback, 352 pages, with colour plate section and in-text black and white illustrations, 234x156mm, ISBN 9780198812463, published…
David Bowie: the boy who never gave up
A few years ago Will Brooker spent 12 months pretending to be David Bowie. For several weeks he dressed up…
Who are today’s fictional heroes?
What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality:…
Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot
I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…
How troll stories blighted the life of Patrick O’Brian
Patrick O’Brian, born Richard Patrick Russ, never wanted his life written, and this passionate wish presents the first hurdle to…
Neither ‘Mad Dog’ nor ‘Warrior Monk’, General Jim Mattis is a thoughtful strategist
General Jim Mattis ended his remarkable career as a four-star US marine general, and finally as US secretary of defense.…
The genius of Reynolds Stone: a private man in a public world
You may not know the name of Reynolds Stone, but it is almost impossible that you haven’t come across his…
Burnt out at 27: the tragedy of Janis Joplin
Janis Joplin hated the word ‘star’, but she loved the trappings. As soon as she made serious money she bought…
When a footman’s home is his castle
My own love for this memoir may be all to do with snobbery and self-identification. Moreover, I’ve always thought a…
How I’ll remember John Humphrys — by his producer Sarah Sands
There was a dinner in Soho to celebrate the publication of John Humphrys’s book, A Day Like Today. John was…
Duty, devotion and lack of self-pity — Anne Glenconner is an example to us all
Trained from a young age to be self-effacing, never liking to be the centre of attention, having been traumatised for…
The other half of Wham!
Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to…
