Books
The internet was never intended to spy on us
There is a trend in non-fiction — in fact my editor has been on to me about this lately —…
The unimportance of Ernest Hemingway: why should we bother reading him anymore?
What is the most repulsive sentence in English/American literature? Even as a 12-year-old American boy, I cringed when reading, in…
One hundred years on, could we cope with a new flu pandemic?
Do you remember the swine flu panic a decade ago? Jeremy Brown, the author of this book, describes it here.…
Beware the female stalker: Dream Sequence, by Adam Foulds, reviewed
Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on…
The ghostly Thames: Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, reviewed
While its shape is famous — prominent on maps of London and Oxford — the Thames is ‘unmappable’, according to…
Train journeys may be losing their romance — but there are other adventures still to be had
Monisha Rajesh wrote lovingly about the Indian railways in her previous book, Around India in 80 Trains; but her new…
Leftist wonderland
Kerry O’Brien in his mammoth memoir argues that his decades of ABC TV presenting were not Left-biased. It’s an easy…
Ernst Jünger — reluctant captain of the Wehrmacht
Ernst Jünger, who died in 1998, aged 102, is now better known for his persona than his work. A deeply…
How Enoch Powell fancied himself Viceroy of India — and other startling revelations
Interviews, like watercolours, are very hard to get right, and yet look how steadily their art has become degraded and…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat: the triumph of Rorke’s Drift
On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement: On this…
How Eric Clapton’s racism sparked a musical revolution
On 13 August 1977, a demonstration by the National Front was routed in the streets of Lewisham by thousands of…
The best way to defeat totalitarianism? Treat it as a joke
Is there anything one can never laugh about? A question inevitably hanging over humour writing, it’s best answered by the…
Is the threat of capital punishment really the foundation of good behaviour?
Richard Wrangham embraces controversy, and appears to enjoy munching apples from carts he upsets himself. While his new book seems…
Lost in allegory: The Wall, by John Lanchester, reviewed
Dystopian fiction continues to throng the bookshelves, for all the world as though we weren’t living in a dystopia already,…
Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…
Pitches in the boardroom: football’s future assured
This is a story of resurrection. A mere three decades ago, club football in England was a professional game largely…
Investigative journalists: new crime fiction reviewed
Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller,…
Hungary is being led once again down a dangerous nationalistic path
Norman Stone has already written, with a brilliant blend of humour, understanding and scepticism, histories of the Eastern Front, Turkey,…
Should William Penn be shaking in his grave?
The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a…
Partying with John and Yoko: The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, reviewed
Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts…
Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed
There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…
It’s a lifetime of hard work being an artist
Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found…
Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed
From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…
Make it a new year’s resolution to be less active
As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of…
Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution
In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…
