Books
‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts
Bourgeois homes in the early 19th century became ‘virtual museums of death’, with models of heroes jostling replicas of the hands and feet of lost loved ones
Bloodbath at West Chapple farm
Fifty years after its original publication, John Cornwell’s account of the Devon murder mystery involving three dysfunctional siblings remains as haunting as ever
My adventures in experimental music – by David Keenan
In pieces dating from 1998 to 2015, the ‘rock evangelist’ interviews the revolutionary musicians of the time and recalls the ‘beautiful shambles’ of the first gig he ever attended
Adrift in strange lands: The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, reviewed
A sense of unease runs through Nettel’s latest short stories as the protagonists start to lose their bearings in increasingly unfamiliar scenarios
Friends fall out in the English civil war
Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, close colleagues in the 1630s, find themselves on opposite sides in the bitter conflict a decade later
The benign republic of Julian Barnes
The novelist presents his utopia – of unilateral disarmament and the public ownership of transport – in the tone of a thoughtful vicar giving an anodyne sermon somewhere in the Home Counties
The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed
Watts skilfully conjures a sense of impending doom as a young couple’s expedition to the American Southwest is threatened by deadly fires sweeping through California
The story of food in glorious technicolour
Jenny Linford explores the global history of cooking and eating through specific items from the British Museum spanning recorded history
Time is running out for the world’s great rivers
Overfishing, industrial pollution and dams are squeezing life from once revered waterways that have sustained civilisations for centuries
Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?
The young are too busy enjoying themselves, the middle-aged are loath to initiate it and the elderly themselves can’t always take part, but it’s a subject sorely in need of public discourse
Only Hitler could have brought the disparate Allies together
Their collaboration was riven by secret deals and betrayals, with Roosevelt suspicious of Churchill and Stalin suspicious of everyone, but all purporting to be great friends
Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction
A sadistic octogenarian meets her match in a malevolent eight-year-old at a Luxor hotel. Thrillers by Christopher Bollen, Henry Wise, Charlotte Philby and Cristina Rivera Garza reviewed
The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed
A magnificent imagining of the life of Lambert Simnel traces his progress from farm boy to coronation in Dublin to turnspit in the Tudor palace kitchens to plans of dark revenge
The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A
A meditation on Quartet for the End of Time, Oliver Messiaen’s great prison camp composition, should bring the strange, bird-fixated religious avant-gardist new admirers
Why we never tire of tales of pointless polar hardship
Out in the middle of nowhere, our heroes and anti-heroes are stripped down to essentials and the quest for knowledge becomes a quest for self-knowledge and human improvement
The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost
In the manic years 1886-88 when he lived with his brother in Paris, Vincent worked at fever-pitch, exhausting himself and Theo and driving them both towards insanity
Christianity in England is dying – and our national identity with it
The self, not society, has begun to matter most to people, with the collective life threatened by ragged bands of individualists lacking a sense of history and burdened by the mere present
The pain of being a Bangle – despite sunshine through the rain
The more successful the female rock band became, the unhappier they seemed, with in-fighting and ‘suicidal thoughts’ leading to break up shortly after their greatest hit
Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali
Countless people apparently found her fascinating, but apart from being shrewd, scary, intelligent and very beady about money, it’s hard to see why
What did John Lennon, Jacques Cousteau, Simon Wiesenthal and Freddie Mercury have in common?
They were all stamp collectors, and feature among Robert Irwin’s oddball fraternity caught up in a collecting mania spanning centuries
A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed
With clear parallels to Angelica Bell at Charleston, young Ivy believes herself a constant disappointment to her family of avant-garde writers and artists
‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein
When misguided well-wishers suggest to Edelstein, post-mastectomy, that she might now have ‘the breasts of her dreams’, she wants to reply that those had always been her own
Marriage, motherhood and money: Show Don’t Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed
Funny, smart stories explore the ‘stale’ married state, the anxieties of parenthood and the sweet-sour nature of female friendship. But do they go far enough?
The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists
Simon Park follows the current trend of accusing Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama and other famous navigators of seeking personal enrichment above all else
Vindictive to the last: a Nazi atrocity in Tuscany
Even in retreat in August 1944, a German posse carried out a particularly brutal triple murder at a hillside farm outside Florence in a vendetta against the Einstein family
