Books

Left: The main gate to the mighty citadel has withstood centuries of invasion. Now much scarred, it presides over a bombed-out city, including the wrecked medieval souq (above), until recently the world’s largest and most vibrant covered historic market and Unesco world heritage site

Syria's Stalingrad: how Aleppo slipped from tolerance to terrorism

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Justin Marozzi on the bitter irony of Aleppo’s ancient motto

Anthony Quinn’s Freya: an engaging costume drama

5 March 2016 9:00 am

The name Freya is derived from the old Norse word for ‘spouse’, perhaps Odin’s. As a goddess she is variously…

Nietzsche's school jeremiad sounds oddly familiar

5 March 2016 9:00 am

When Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a professorship in classical philology at the university of Basel in 1869 he was so…

American nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll, July 1946

The frightening, fascinating, inspiring story of radiation

5 March 2016 9:00 am

About a century ago, scientists started meddling with an unfamiliar force of nature and the rest of us were terrified.…

Admiral Kolchak, supreme ruler of the Whites: when shown his likeness, some peasants guessed that he was ‘probably an Englishman’

When the Russians killed Mother Russia

5 March 2016 9:00 am

On the 24–25 October 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, or 7–8 November according to the Gregorian) the political disputes which…

The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…

The unforeseen dangers of Uber and Airbnb

5 March 2016 9:00 am

In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be…

Julie Myerson captures the sorrow that surpasses all understanding

5 March 2016 9:00 am

As its title suggests, Julie Myerson’s tenth novel is about stoppage: the kind that happens when one suffers a loss…

Nimoy and Shatner in ‘The Man Trap’, the first episode of Star Trek (September 1966)

Close encounters on the starship Enterprise

5 March 2016 9:00 am

For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’…

Always prone to depression: David Astor c.1946

David Astor: the saintly, tormented man who remade the Observer

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor…

What went wrong with the world economy: Mervyn King’s analysis

5 March 2016 9:00 am

I once asked an American friend to come and talk to the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. He…

Three writers

5 March 2016 9:00 am

This ‘documentary’ of the lives and careers of Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall presents a detailed account,…

Clockwise from top left: Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Simone de Beauvoir

Sartre, de Beauvoir and Sheffield teenagers; the weird glamour of existentialism

27 February 2016 9:00 am

We all carried their philosophy around in our youth, says Philip Hensher. But did anyone — including the existentialists themselves — really understand it?

‘Street musicians’; and (right) portrait of Neville Lyttelton by Randolph Schwabe

Meet Paul Nash's great enemy at the Slade

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Randolph Schwabe (b. 1885) was a measured man in art and in life. His drawings are meticulous, closely observed models…

The ZX81

When Britannia ruled the digital waves

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be…

Author Javier Marias (Photo: Getty)

Javier Marías's Thus Bad Begins: A touch of Vertigo in post-Franco Madrid

27 February 2016 9:00 am

The title comes from Hamlet but the spirit that hovers over the pages of Javier Marías’s new novel is —…

A Russian barber cuts off the beard of an Old Believer. In 1705, as part of his ruthless campaign of modernisation, Peter the Great imposed a tax on beards of up to 100 roubles

Why do men grow beards?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has…

Robert Lowell c. 1940

Love, Robert Lowell and poetic licence

27 February 2016 9:00 am

The conceit of this book — the author’s third on Robert Lowell — is strong, although its execution is less…

Groucho Marx (Photo: Getty)

When Groucho Marx lectured T.S. Eliot

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Groucho Marx was delighted when he heard that the script for one of his old Vaudeville routines was being reprinted…

High drama on the high seas

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Ian McGuire’s second novel is an exercise in extremes: extremes of suffering, violence, environment, language and character. It tells the…

Benjamin Franklin in London, with the bust of Isaac Newton on his desk

Benjamin Franklin: from man about town to man on the run

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…

Phil Lynott performs with Thin Lizzy (Photo: Getty)

Phil Lynott, from Dublin teenager to rock'n'roll burnout

27 February 2016 9:00 am

It’s often said that there are only seven basic plots in literature. When it comes to biographies of rock stars…

The watchers and the watched: Patrick Flanery's I Am No One

27 February 2016 9:00 am

‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…

Happy early days: Erika and Klaus in 1927

Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…

The sacrifice of Iphigenia: Agamemnon’s crime was ‘impious’, according to Lucretius

What did the ancient Greeks believe?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…