Books
Bloodbath in the Pacific
The US operation of 1945 to take the island of Okinawa was the largest battle of the Pacific during the…
Just the beginning
In Japan, people thought the world would end in 1052. In the decades leading up to judgment day, Kyoto was…
East meets west
When musicians from outside the Anglo-American pop mainstream achieve success in the West, there are conflicting reactions. Seun Kuti, the…
The enemy within
It’s easy to dismiss the fascistic ideologues who populate Graham Macklin’s book as reactionary cranks of no significance. It’s also…
Catch me if you can
NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno…
Dealing in death
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
A foul-weather family
Excess, incest and marital misery were in the blood. Frances Wilson uncovers several generations of infamous Byrons
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…
