Books

Ferdinand Mount at the 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival

Understated eloquence

8 April 2017 9:00 am

It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature…

A unique literary phenomenon

8 April 2017 9:00 am

The Argentinian writer César Aira is a prodigy: at the age of 68 he has published, according to a ‘partial…

The lost Stradivarius

8 April 2017 9:00 am

Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules…

Fresh-faced and knowing: Charlotte Rampling in the 1970s

An untouchable star

8 April 2017 9:00 am

This slight book comes with heavy baggage. In 2009, Rampling handed back a hefty advance for her contribution to a…

Fragments of the future

8 April 2017 9:00 am

Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the…

As early as 1895, Octave Uzanne foresaw ‘the end of books’ with the invention of the portable audiobook. Illustration from ‘Contes pour les bibliophiles’

The pleasures of reading aloud

8 April 2017 9:00 am

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The cacao tree in flower and fruit. Its only pollinators are flies — so without flies there would be no chocolate

Buzzing bees and chocolate trees

8 April 2017 9:00 am

It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return,…

Nicky Beard on holiday in Cornwall shortly before his death

Two small boys in the sea

8 April 2017 9:00 am

An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK.…

Not everyone’s dream: the Simpson Desert, Australia

Dreaming of wide open spaces

1 April 2017 9:00 am

On the website of the Australian National University in Canberra, emeritus professor of history Barry Higman lists his research interests…

Anna Magnani: Fellini describes her circling the Pantheon, laden with bags, feeding stray cats

The sweet life turns sour

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Shawn Levy specialises in chronicling 20th-century hotspots such as London in the Sixties and Sinatra’s Vegas. Here, he turns his…

The man who’s read everything

1 April 2017 9:00 am

According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced…

George (left) and Willie Muse were exhibited for decades as fairground freaks — billed as ‘sheep-headed cannibals from Ecuador’ or ‘ambassadors from Mars’

The saddest show on earth

1 April 2017 9:00 am

It’s the early 20th century, and two strange-looking boys, purportedly twins named Iko and Eko, are playing in a circus…

Out of hot water

1 April 2017 9:00 am

During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as…

Back to basics

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Tim Parks is a writer of some very fine books indeed, which makes it even more of a shame that…

A choice of recent thrillers

1 April 2017 9:00 am

A young Norwegian police officer finds a rusting vintage car inside a locked and disused barn, and the presence of…

Who’s the expert now?

1 April 2017 9:00 am

The title might be taken as a provocation. In the compressed language of digital media, white tears, like first-world problems…

Furry fury

1 April 2017 9:00 am

Thanks to Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell I have spent hours in the company of otters, though I have only…

Self-portrait

Welsh wizardry

1 April 2017 9:00 am

When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence…

The best sort of magic realism

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Michael Fishwick’s new novel tells the story of a young man called Robbie, who has been uprooted from his London…

A genial green guide to 2000 AD

25 March 2017 9:00 am

I can recall exactly where I was 40 years ago when I didn’t buy the first issue — or ‘prog’…

The burning of Savonarola (detail) Getty Images

Mach the Knife

25 March 2017 9:00 am

The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning ‘counter’) was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici bank, founded…

Boualem Sansal

Prophesying doom

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Boualem Sansal’s prophetic novel very clearly derives its lineage from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A totalitarian surveillance state, a fundamentalist…

George Fox, founder of the Quakers, was no fanatic, but a practical man of God. He is likened to St Francis of Assisi for his ‘charistmatic blend of literalness and freedom’

Holy heroes

25 March 2017 9:00 am

The Reformation is such a huge, sprawling historical subject that it makes sense, in this the 500th anniversary of Martin…

Susan Hill

The road to independence

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can…

Sana Krasikov

An epic for our times

25 March 2017 9:00 am

Trailing rave US reviews, fan letters from Yann Martel and Khaled Hosseini and a reputation as ‘Doctor Zhivago for the…