Books
The mystery of the waggle-dance
The Dancing Bees is a romantic title, evoking fantasy and fairy tale rather than scientific rigour, but actually this book…
The great depression
If it was not yet ‘The Age of Anxiety’ in 1947, when Auden published his long poem of the same…
Misadventures in Libya
If photographs of ‘the deal in the desert’ made you queasy — you remember, Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi shaking…
A merry guide
If you have legs, or a bicycle, or indeed both, you are going to love this book. Chaps, no matter…
Cervantes the seer
William Egginton opens his book with a novelistic reimagining: here’s Miguel de Cervantes, a toothless old geezer of nearly 60,…
Missing in action
‘Missing in action is the worst state to which we can lose a human being,’ avers Commodore (Ret.) Ajith Boyagoda…
Into a cloud-scratched sky
There have been a number of attempts to graft the style of the so-called new nature writing onto the novel:…
The clean and the unclean
In 1991, Moby folded the theme from Twin Peaks into a remix of his dance track ‘Go’ and a diminutive,…
Park life
Petrichor. Coined as recently as 1964 but redolent of Eden onwards, the word appears in neither of these volumes but…
Hacks and robbers
Readers of advanced years like me will almost certainly remember the bow-tied figure of Edgar Lustgarten, star of any number…
Woolton’s war
In wartime the housekeeping is a nightmare. While fighting Napoleon in Spain the Duke of Wellington sent an infuriated letter…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
Nicky Haslam: my two absolutely fabulous girlfriends
Many years ago, working on a project in Tel Aviv, I had a meeting-free weekend. I know, I thought, I’ll…
For fashionable Victorian travellers, the only way was Norway
‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’…
Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces
Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…
A good man at the 1970s BBC
When I saw this book, a biography of Huw Wheldon, who was managing director of BBC Television between 1968 and…
When mother killed the plumber — and Nellie Melba came round to sing
Here’s a pair of little books — one even littler than the other — by Robin Dalton (née Eakin), a…
Do myths and folklore damage children’s brains?
Children’s fantasy literature has never been just one thing. Animal fables, folk and fairy tales were not originally intended for…
The hopeless wasteland of modern Russia
‘Gilded doorknobs,’ spits a Party diehard as she contemplates the blessings of the Soviet Union’s collapse. ‘Is this freedom?’ Dozens…
James Duke of Monmouth: perhaps the best king we never had
In Pepys’s famous words, James, Duke of Monmouth was ‘the most skittish, leaping gallant that ever I saw, always in…
Le Clézio’s The Prospector: from tropical beaches to the trenches of the Somme
It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient…
'Wicked old Paris of the Orient': a portrait of 1930s Shanghai
Here’s the Mandarin for ooh-la-la! As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive…
How Siddhartha Mukherjee gets it wrong on IQ, sexuality and epigenetics
A clear, accurate, up-to-date pop science book on genetics would have been most welcome, says Stuart Ritchie. Sadly, this isn’t it
Elegiac and exuberant: short stories from Philip Hensher and Helen Oyeyemi
Discussions about the short story too often fall into a false dichotomy that can be characterised, in essence, by a…
The dying days of the English country house
Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at…
