Books
The roots of witchcraft
Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…
The search for meaning
He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first…
A countercultural upheaval
‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
Watching from the wings
The story of Sweetpea Slight is a footnote to a footnote in the annals of British theatre. Even her name…
A clash of creeds
This is a very modern novel. Terrorist atrocity sits side by side with the familiar and the mundane. Where better…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
A feminist trailblazer
On the evening of 28 October 1908, two unremarkable middle-class women wearing heavy overcoats gained admission to the Ladies’ Gallery,…
The German Lion of Africa
What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
The violence of poverty
Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own.…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
The morality of conducting
Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with…
Torn between envy and contempt
Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s…
No pain, no gain
It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed…
Pretentious rock on a grand scale
There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so…
A choice of first novels
Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your…
Some insights into autism
The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a…
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Formidable black talons…
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…
Heroines of the Soviet Union
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…
The evil that men do
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…
Art of diplomacy
The language of diplomacy often requires nuance and subtlety. Not infrequently, it needs to be opaque, to enable differing interpretations;…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
