Books
How one man took on the French betting system — and kept winning against the odds
About a third of the way through this book I worked out that I had an unbeatable system for winning…
It’s impossible to live up to the expectations of motherhood
In a 1974 interview celebrating the quarter century since the publication of her classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de…
A hymn to self-loathing: Tibor Fischer’s How to Rule the World reviewed
Tibor Fischer has a track record with humour. His first novel, the Booker shortlisted Under the Frog, takes its title…
Give me Shakespeare’s Macbeth over Jo Nesbo’s any day
It must have seemed a good idea to someone: commissioning a range of well-known novelists to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for…
Sober liberal
Australia has a rich heritage of nineteenth century classical liberalism. But that history has been almost completely lost in the…
1968 and the summer of our discontent
’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the…
Free as a bird: the beauty and exhilaration of gliding
Over the years I’ve been in touch with a number of middle-aged professionals who, despite the success they’ve found in…
Spend, spend, spend at the court of Philip IV of Spain
‘Nine hours,’ boasted my friend the curator about his trip to the Prado. Nine! Two hours is my upper limit…
For peat’s sake: Britain’s bogs and moorland in crisis
In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’.…
How can we know what dead people want?
In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as…
Alarm bells ring when I read about grown women and dolls
Mona — single, childless, pushing 60 — sells wooden dolls made by a carpenter friend, which she delicately costumes from…
Meeting the last Cuban fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway
In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the…
The swallows that herald spring
Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual…
Why do the Japanese despise sex?
There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had…
The selfish shrink: life with Jacques Lacan
Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise…
Down’s syndrome and dystopia in Jesse Bull’s Census
Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from…
The enduring enigma of Nefertiti
Often dubbed the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, the bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti is as immediately recognisable…
How Christianity saw off its rivals and became the universal church
In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course…
Think of five things you use daily that weren’t made in a factory
Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we…
Cockney comfort food: eel, pie and mash to the sound of Bow bells
Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet…
First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…
Who knew that Arabic has more than 30 words for wine?
You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and…
False confessions to murder in 1970s Iceland
Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten…
I’m in danger of becoming a flat-mind bore
Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are…
Are the French right to be obsessed with their Gaulish ancestry?
Katrina Gulliver 31 March 2018 9:00 am
This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David…