Books
Passing bells for old Tokyo
In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after…
Oddballs of English philosophy
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…
Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…
Last lines on Brexit from Geoffrey Hill
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition.…
Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…
The stormy lives of Jack the Dripper and the Wife with the Knife
A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable…
Murder at Margate — and other crimes of passion
Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with…
Levitating basketball players: investigating the psychic in sport
Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books,…
Where were you when you read John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’?
Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If…
Unforgotten person
A newly-elected Australian Prime Minister was pleased to receive a letter of congratulations from Australia’s longest serving PM, Sir Robert…
How to lose friends and alienate people: Richard Holbrooke was a past master
You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under…
The only thing that baffled Einstein was his own popularity
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s…
Who needs psychogeography? Plume, by Will Wiles, reviewed
With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like…
What really amused Queen Victoria? Dwarfs, giants and bearded women
The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and…
London after the Great Fire: The King’s Evil, by Andrew Taylor, reviewed
The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless…
Is there no end to the retelling of classical myths?
In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
Character building
Having fired off his first challenge in paragraph one (‘Read every word of this book, but don’t believe a word…
Not all British memsahibs were racist snobs
Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the…
