Books
Too good to be true
The McNulty family in the novels of Sebastian Barry have a definite claim to be one of the unluckiest in…
His and her healthcare
When I started this book, I have to admit, I did not think it would be as absolutely fascinating as…
England’s unloved king
Aethelred the Unready (c.968—1016) has not, as Levi Roach acknowledges, enjoyed a good press. In recent times there may have…
A parable of good and evil
It is difficult to write well about slavery. As with the Holocaust, the subject’s horrific nature lends itself too easily…
Courting the Iron Lady
This is a strange book. Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS, is packing up his office. It is a…
A study in alienation
Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story…
Trumped up
If Donald Trump keeps campaigning on immigration, he cannot lose. His Democrat rival for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton, has…
Thoroughly bewitching
Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed novelist: perhaps one of the last generation of novelists to change both the…
A puzzling phenomenon
Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky;…
Over hill and dale
When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle…
Derring-do in the desert
The SAS was the first unit to be granted regimental status for generations. Its chief aim was to damage the…
The magic of bookshops
It is not uncommon for writers to be obsessed by bookshops. Some even find their writing feet through loving a…
Bolsheviks on board
Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it…
More sinned against than sinning
The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in…
The spell of the pharaohs
Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile,…
Jolly good fellows
‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the…
Smoke and mirrors
Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds…
Nazis and narcotics
Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the…
Lessons in sex
Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is…
Cocktails, castles and cadging
Here is a veritable feast for fans of Paddy Leigh Fermor. This is the story of a well-lived life through…
The art of listening
Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in…
All work, many plays
‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little…
Knight’s tale
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in…
Frankly impenetrable
One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free,…
Recent crime fiction
There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy…
