Books
The city of ugly love
Cuba’s gorgeous, crumbling capital has always been a testing ground for writers. That heady combination of revolution, cocktails, sex and…
Fallen idols
David Hepworth is such a clever writer — not just clever in the things he writes, but in the way…
A brave new world – at gunpoint
Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most…
Gold and dust
Timbuktu. Can any other three syllables evoke such a thrill? For travellers, explorers and historians of Africa, the ancient desert…
Not-so-sweet 16
I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is…
Escapism for boys
Jack Higgins’s writing routine was said to start with dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant in Jersey, followed by writing…
No ordinary judge
Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the…
Paradise or prison?
This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story…
Soaring and singing
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature…
Love under wraps
It’s an important subject: the existence of a permanent and significant minority within London’s life. Gay men and lesbians have…
Deeply mysterious
The human urge for personal hygiene has had many improbable side-effects, and I can confidently assert that through the ages,…
The books the Nazis didn’t burn
For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking…
Signs and spellsnich
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He…
Flee or die
Every nation has the right to control its borders, but we in the West are getting a bit too comfortable…
Ripping yarns
In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just…
Pets in the Blitz
War Horse, by way of book and play and film, has brought the role of horses in war into the…
A great awakening
One afternoon in August 1978, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan were flying from Beijing to Shanghai. They were on the…
When will we ever learn?
In 2012, sugar became more dangerous than gunpowder. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, of the 56 million people…
On the trail of a lost masterpiece
On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a…
Cinderella in China
She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of…
Climb trees and grow a beard
A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he…
Suspension of disbelief
The history of modern medicine is a roll call of brilliant minds making breakthrough discoveries. We rarely hear about the…
In a dark forest
In his mid-forties Will Ashon realised he was adrift and confused, confronted by the situation Dante described in the Divine…
Burning issues
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is…
Appointment with death
It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles…
