Books

A feminist trailblazer

12 August 2017 9:00 am

On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery,…

General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in 1917

The German Lion of Africa

12 August 2017 9:00 am

What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…

Holidays with Hitler

12 August 2017 9:00 am

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

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…

Self-portrait, with his wife Margaret

A dazzling vision

12 August 2017 9:00 am

There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…

The maestro could hear if a single player was doing something wrong, even in the most noisy tutti

The morality of conducting

5 August 2017 9:00 am

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

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…

No pain, no gain

5 August 2017 9:00 am

It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed…

Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett performing in 1967

Pretentious rock on a grand scale

5 August 2017 9:00 am

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

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…

Some insights into autism

5 August 2017 9:00 am

The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a…

… and an awesome beak

5 August 2017 9:00 am

The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…

Dan Powell

Formidable black talons…

5 August 2017 9:00 am

I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…

Lyudmila Pavlichenko at Sevastopol, 6 June 1942. Her total confirmed kills during the second world war amounted to 309, including 36 enemy snipers

Heroines of the Soviet Union

5 August 2017 9:00 am

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

5 August 2017 9:00 am

The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…

Art of diplomacy

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The language of diplomacy often requires nuance and subtlety. Not infrequently, it needs to be opaque, to enable differing interpretations;…

With the all-encompassing model of Moby-Dick behind him, Hoare presents us with a vast and billowing medley of marinaria

Spirits from the vasty deep…

29 July 2017 9:00 am

‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…

The Shard’s angled, fractured sides change its appearance according to London’s sky conditions

Towering extravagance

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…

Rules of behaviour

29 July 2017 9:00 am

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

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…

Roxane Gay: ruminative, repetitive and solipsistic

A cacophony of complaint

29 July 2017 9:00 am

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

29 July 2017 9:00 am

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

29 July 2017 9:00 am

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…

A 19th-century version of the Black Prince, by Benjamin Burnell

Black prince or white knight?

29 July 2017 9:00 am

We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…

Stretcher-parties wading through the morass sometimes took six hours to bring in casualties. Left: near Boesinghe, 1 August 1917 (from Chris McNabb’s Passchendaele 1917)

Drowning in mud and blood

29 July 2017 9:00 am

George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…