Books
The miseries of diplomatic life: heat, bedbugs and endless cocktail parties
The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century…
Every day is mother’s day for writers: most have strong feelings about their mothers, though not always of love
You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a…
Shadows of the past are ominously present in a trio of memorable first novels
The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section…
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre
I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the…
From Louis XIV to the Shah of Iran: celebrities under the surgeon’s knife
Powerful memoirs by such eloquent doctors as Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande, Henry Marsh, Gabriel Weston and Paul Kalanithi have whipped…
Be a spy like me, Charlotte Bingham’s father advises
That there’s a direct correlation between sex and spying is probably Ian Fleming’s fault. Hard to think of Bond without…
How a 14th-century Arab thinker influenced Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy
At a press conference in October 1981, Ronald Reagan quoted Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in support of what is known…
Dying buddleias on railway lines are what excite the new nature writer
A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the…
You deserve a prize if you manage to finish Jim Crace’s latest novel
This remorselessly slow-moving, hazily allegorical drama about ageing and xenophobia is Jim Crace’s 12th book, and the first to appear…
Alastair Campbell’s mix of football and terrorism makes for an accomplished thriller
Alastair Campbell is a man of many parts. Journalist, spin doctor extraordinaire, diarist and now novelist. For this, his third…
Debussy: the musical genius who erupted out of nowhere
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
Is Tegucigalpa the crime capital of the world?
The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says:…
The Adulterants: a caustic take on London’s brutal property market
Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The…
Spain has effectively obliterated Franco’s memory
Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the…
The body count piles up in Mick Herron’s London Rules
The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely…
The Book of Joan: part apocalyptic tale, part erotic poem
Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines…
Hitler’s charm offensive at the Berlin Olympics was a sinister cover for his main offensive
The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
César Aira returns to the evocative small-town landscape of his youth
The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the…
Why do people risk their lives to fight for a foreign cause?
What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the…
Kafa, the birthplace of coffee, was a kingdom straight out of Rider Haggard
For many of us, coffee is the lift that eases the load of our working day. Yet the sharpened mental…
It’s not a wave’s crest, but its translucent interior that surfers dream of
Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and…
How Lucky Lucan begged me for money shortly before mistakenly murdering the nanny
A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south…
