Books
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…
Vice guys
In 1981, an FBI team visited Donald Trump to discuss his plans for a casino in Atlantic City. Trump admitted…
Fad fury
Anthony Warner is angry. He’s angry about diets. He’s angry about detoxes. He’s angry about pseudoscience — and he has…
Two dark tales
Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed…
The appeal of mysticism
This extraordinary book has two main characters: Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), an early Zionist and the founder of the modern study…
A choice of first novels
Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen…
Life classes
It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of…
Damage limitation
One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…
Verse and worse
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…
The disgrace of the British left
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…
Blood and bling
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…
The evil that men do
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…
