Books
The art of listening
Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in…
All work, many plays
‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little…
Knight’s tale
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in…
Frankly impenetrable
One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free,…
Recent crime fiction
There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy…
The fallen Angel
Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who…
Untold tales of Tibet
On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer…
Body and soul
Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired…
The curse of Mr Kurtz
Marie Darrieussecq shot to literary fame in France when her bestselling debut, Pig Tales (1996), was a finalist for the…
The quiet patriot
History teaches no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it. There is no political party more sentimental…
Thinking of Israel
‘Here is a story from the winter days of the end of 1959 and the beginning of 1960,’ announces the…
The Crusades live
The 12th-century crusader Reynald de Chatillon was one of the most controversial men of his time, and his new biographer…
When less is more
It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before…
Who you think you are
The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays about black and ethnic minority experience and identity in Britain today, is inconsistent,…
What makes Turkey tick
I remember an American author once saying she wrote about love and friendship because, after all, these were the fundamental…
War games
For a long time the Australian military has been very wary about public discussions, so this first book is a…
My mother, my self
To tell this story of his search for a mother lost to mystery in early infancy, its author uses the…
In a gun country
Picking a day at random, ‘an unremarkable Saturday in America’, the Guardian journalist Gary Younge identified ten children and teenagers…
A woman of some importance
Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person…
Yemen Notebook
Most nights Saudi bombers fly low over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa dealing out random destruction. High up in the…
Come in, but keep your voices down
The illustrated manuscripts of the European Middle Ages are among the most beautiful works to survive from a maligned and…
Monet’s great war effort
Claude Monet wanted to be buried in a buoy. ‘This idea seemed to please him,’ his friend Gustave Geffroy wrote.…
The power of the American oligarchs
Talk about plutocracy and oligarchy has become commonplace in America, as the billionaire class grows ever richer and seemingly more…
Twists and turns of the Italian campaign
When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that…
One long moanfest
Tama Janowitz’s memoir is a relentlessly cheerless and bitter collection of vignettes. Between tales of her purportedly miserly, creepy and…
