Books
Stone not gathering moss
If you are part of that multitude of Australians who fear that our country is drifting backwards – becoming less…
Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness
Dresden defined the horror of war: revenge and cold-blooded murder. It still does, says Christopher Priest
The sound of Brum
Those who conduct the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra may not be aware that musicians fill in a form after…
Proper horror
anna asMany of our favourite folk tales have lost much of their original Gothic horror in later versions. By contrast,…
Asia’s ancient feuds
The mutual animosity of the Far East Asian nations can strike some as baffling, given their shared history and cultures,…
Nothing to see here
Anyone reading Clement Knox’s history of seduction for salacious entertainment is likely to be disappointed: it contains no mention of…
Snowbound isolation
In my twenties I once visited a lonely spot among the western Himalayas called Zhuldok in the Suru valley. Politically…
Run for your life
Lydia and Luca are hiding in the shower room of their home while 16 members of her family are murdered.…
The great leveller
In the middle of the last century, Robert Collison, one of the founders of the Society of Indexers, addressed himself…
Propaganda wars
Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by…
The negativity bias
Negativity has a power over us. You know how it is. One bad thing can ruin your whole day, even…
My family the Macbeths
Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native…
Clive the poet
Clive James (1939-2019), in the much-quoted words of a New Yorker profile, was a brilliant bunch of guys. One of…
A hollow, empty experiment
In 1973, a social psychologist from Stanford perpetrated one of the greatest scientific frauds of recent history. Its consequences still resonate today, says Andrew Scull
A remarkable, common skill
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a…
The miller’s son from Leiden
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) is not only the presiding genius of the Dutch golden age of painting, but one…
Pacific theatre
It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when…
The crazy spirit of comedy
Doddy! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of tickling sticks. So also hath the rest of…
Ways of escape
Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes.…
The wanderings of Ullis
Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in…
A burning passion
Poor Cassy. The Miss Austen of this novel’s title is Cassandra, Jane’s elder sister. She was to have married Thomas…
Making mischief
Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you…
Mavericks of morality
Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to…
How far can you go?
Alert to the combination of a controversial issue and a brilliant writer, Serpent’s Tail have bought This is a Pleasure,…
Evil personified
The atrocities of the concentration camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau are now universally known, but it is still almost beyond belief that…
