Books
A feminist trailblazer
On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery,…
The German Lion of Africa
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
The violence of poverty
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
The morality of conducting
Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with…
Torn between envy and contempt
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…
Pretentious rock on a grand scale
There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so…
A choice of first novels
Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…
Some insights into autism
The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a…
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Formidable black talons…
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…
Heroines of the Soviet Union
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…
The evil that men do
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…
Art of diplomacy
The language of diplomacy often requires nuance and subtlety. Not infrequently, it needs to be opaque, to enable differing interpretations;…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
Towering extravagance
The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…
Rules of behaviour
It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
His own worst enemy
One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Black prince or white knight?
We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…
Drowning in mud and blood
George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…