Books
Leeches, bats and toxic sap in Borneo’s Eden
Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare…
An 80th birthday party causes no end of trouble in Barney Norris’s latest novel
‘People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them,’ muses the…
Ethnic cleansing and the horrors of Buczacz
I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Getting women on board: the history of the WRNS
This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy…
Jenny Erpenbeck finds a novel way to tackle the migrant problem
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires,…
Year of Ferrari
2017 was of course the year of Ferrari, as one of the most recognised luxury brands on the planet celebrated…
Australia was ruined the moment Europeans set foot there
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down…
Has Ann Quin’s time come at last?
Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…
My ex-lover’s T-shirt can join the other tragic tat in the Museum of Broken Relationships
I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s…
What America needs is another Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it…
How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…
The thrill of living dangerously inspires the latest first novels
Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short…
Peter Carey’s latest novel is a merciless excavation of Australian history
More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until…
Did the fabled Phoenicians ever actually exist?
So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s little house of horrors on the prairies
In 1932, the Daily Plainsman of Huron, South Dakota, ran a feature about a local woman convalescing in hospital. Grace…
Six of the best short story collections
While the short story is currently under-going one of its periods of robust, if not rude, health, its two dominant…
How could anyone possibly want a Roundhead ancestor?
The late Michael Foot used to say that the first thing he needed to know about a new acquaintance was,…
Photographing the extraordinary ordinariness of 1950s America
The career of the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank stands in direct antithesis to the characteristics of his native Switzerland.…
Nan Shepherd’s lonely uphill struggle
‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, perhaps the most famous line Nan Shepherd wrote, is carved in…
Describing the indescribable: news from the Western Front
At the close of the 1970s, I found a selection of postcards in an antique shop which had been sent…
It’s time to rehabilitate Ulysses S. Grant — scorned hero of the Civil War
Last year, more than 6,000,000 people visited the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. By contrast, barely 80,000 went to General…
