Books
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
Diagnosing diversity
Our Constitution and the debates leading to it make clear our founders assumed citizens would enjoy five great liberal democratic…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Beyond the pale
You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of…
Voices of exile
During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of…
China syndrome
Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…
Self’s obsessions
This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a…
On matters maritime
The Greenland shark has to be one of the most fascinating creatures of which you’ve probably never heard. Growing sometimes…
Latest crime fiction
Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city…
Taking the rough with the smooth
In The Ambassadors, Henry James sends Lewis Lambert Strether from Boston to Paris to retrieve Chad Newsome, the wayward heir…
Mother Medea
Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype…
Crossing the pond
What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to…
Dark night of the soul
As bombs fall everywhere in Syria and IS fighters destroy Palmyra, a musicologist in Vienna lies awake all night thinking…
Hot Spring
Imagine if Kathy Lette — or possibly Julie Burchill — had written a feminist, magic-realist saga that sent four women…
Always the Superbrat
John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to…
In defiance of Il Duce
The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite…
A woman of some importance
It might seem unlikely that a Christian noblewoman could have had influence over a Muslim city in the 13th century,…
Something nasty in the woodshed
I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream…
Doctor of humility
Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm (2014) was that rare thing — a neurosurgeon showing his fallibility in public and…
High flyers
It is conventional wisdom in the publishing industry that, despite the old adage, readers do indeed judge books by their…
Whimsical digressions
The practical difficulties of extracting keys from the pockets of tight-fitting trousers while ascending stairs; the logistical hazards of seducing…
Size matters
Trust scientists to ruin all our fun. The spectacularly beautiful 2014 film reboot of Godzilla, it turns out, is anatomically…
Worthy, but wordy
Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit…
