Books
Life classes
It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of…
Damage limitation
One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…
Verse and worse
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…
The disgrace of the British left
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…
Blood and bling
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…
The evil that men do
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…
Do we give a hoot?
‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between…
She-devils on horseback
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…
Another gone girl
Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in…
Borne back ceaselessly into the past
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936.…
Patience on a monument
As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the…
The greatest survival story
This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…
A policeman’s lot
Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’,…
A barren prospect
In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife,…
Who needs jihad?
Citizens of New World nations – North and South America, Australia and New Zealand – invariably assume that anyone settling…
In praise of neigh-sayers
Wallace Stevens gave us ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. The German scholar Ulrich Raulff, in this meaty book…
Travelling hopefully
Olga Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world. The award-winning Polish writer channels her wanderlust…
Sisters in scandal
In our age of elasticated leisurewear, ready meals and box sets on telly, it is exhilarating to read about people…
Sheen of authenticity
In 2006, after five decades, Shaun Greenhalgh lost his enthusiasm for the British Museum. From a very early age, he…
Nazis and the dark arts
When he came to power Hitler had a dowser scour the Reich Chancellery for cancerous ‘death rays’. Before flying to…
Ever decreasing circles
‘The area’s isolation has given it a strong sense of community and independence,’ runs the Wikipedia entry on New Addington.…
Take heart
In this magnificent book, Thomas Morris provides us with a thoughtful, engaging and rigorous account of how cardiac surgeons through…
Sink or swim
I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now…
Hornet highballs anyone?
After school last Wednesday, I watched my five-year-old daughter pop a dead cricket on to her tongue and proclaim it:…
Three for the road
One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully —…
