Books
Has Paul Theroux finally lost it?
As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I…
A love letter to Turkey’s lost past
Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the…
Secrets of an abused aristocratic childhood
Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the…
Geoffrey Clarke’s imaginative talents knew no bounds
At the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) was buying fast cars and flying…
The rich literature of the game of poker
According to the subtitle, this is a collection of ‘short stories of long nights at the poker table’. Were that…
On the run with Martin Luther King’s assassin
This newly translated novel by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina is really two books, spliced together in alternating chapters.…
Writers’ Letters: Edith Sitwell
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Is Jewish humour the greatest defence mechanism ever created?
If you’re Jewish, or Jew-ish, or merely subscribe to the view that Jews should be trusted to recognise anti-Semitism rather…
Caroline of Ansbach: the best of the Hanoverians
It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets…
The BBC’s battle for Britain
The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with…
Sex and the city: the best art books of the year
‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this.…
Wonder is all around
Different people find different things impressive. Some claim, for instance, to experience a sense of wonder at the fact of…
Milton’s blinding reading list
In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he…
Writer’s Letters: Ernest Hemingway on James Jones
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A crime novel that continues to puzzle
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students…
Drugs and drag queens in New York’s vanished clubland
In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for…
More books of the year
Daniel Swift I spent too much of this (and last) year reading anaemic updatings of Shakespeare plays: pale novels which…
How can I prevent my husband from burning all my post?
If you don’t yet watch Gogglebox on Channel 4, start doing so now. Far from making you despise our couch-potato…
Writer’s Letters: Elizabeth Gaskell on Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Holy mackerel! Civilisation begins with fishing
Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the…
Sex and sycophancy at Rolling Stone
Many moons ago, I worked at the New Musical Express magazine, which transformed me from virgin schoolgirl to the fabulous…
The great Tudor catfight
Apart from glorying in a memorable name, Lettice Knollys has chiefly been known for her connections — with her second…
The 67 words that ensured endless bloodshed
If books about the Israeli-Arab conflict were building blocks, the Palestinians would have their own state already and then some.…
Horatio Clare breaks the ice with the taciturn Finns
In this slim travel book Horatio Clare voyages as a guest on the Finnish icebreaker Otso (Bear), ‘mostly in darkness,…
Menus on the wild side
The terroir of the Kentish coast is faultlessly represented in The Sportsman (Phaidon, £29.95), a book of recipes from an…
