Books
Mussolini’s fall from grace
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally decent fellow led astray by an opportunist alliance with…
High wire act
‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation…
The enigma of Enric Marco
Enric Marco has had a remarkable life. A prominent Catalan union activist, a brave resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil…
Reza Aslan doesn’t fear God. But should he fear his fellow Muslims?
Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as…
Gerry Adams: from jail to the Dail
When I recently asked a sardonic Northern Irish friend what historical figures Gerry Adams resembled, the tasteless reply came back:…
People and place: an outstanding archive of rural Britain
In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard…
Ali Smith’s Winter is calm, cool and consoling
In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge…
A book about sleep that will keep you up all night
I’ve read several books about sleep recently, and their authors all tell me the same three things. The first is…
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Writers’ letters: Evelyn Waugh on Auberon Waugh
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
The spirits of the age
Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising…
More secrets and symbols
Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…
A dense, angry fable
Set partly in a future surveillance society, partly in ancient Carthage and 1970s Ethiopia, partly in contemporary Greece and London…
A sensual Greek goddess
Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…
Help over the hump
Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the…
A Muslim’s insights into Christianity
I’m not a critic, I’m an enthusiast. And when you are an enthusiast you need to try your best to…
Racism is a grey area
This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…
How to be good
Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His…
Animals make us human
There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen…
The martyrdom of Proust
Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by…
A choice of first novels
Black Rock White City (Melville House, £16.99) is ostensibly about a spate of sinister graffiti in a Melbourne hospital. ‘The…
Unearthly powers
This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family…
The pilgrims’ ways
Liza Picard, an chronicler of London society across the centuries, now weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting…
Songs of the blood and the sword
Douglas Murray 28 October 2017 9:00 am
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…