Books
A fresh start
Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. So we’re told. Frits van Egters apparently leads a life more desperate…
Homage to Mad Madge
There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s…
A truly monstrous regiment
When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had…
Hitchcock’s favourite bird
‘The Birds is coming’ screamed the posters for Tippi Hedren’s only famous film. Well, the cats is coming in her…
Cuckoo in the nest
‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches…
Best of 2016
After a slow start 2016 turned out to be a pretty good year for Australian writing, with excellent books across…
Answers to ‘Spot the British Author’
1. Kingsley Amis 2. Beatrix Potter 3. Graham Greene 4. Salman Rushdie 5. Nick Hornby 6. Arthur Conan Doyle 7.…
The descent of man
Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying…
Crime fiction for Christmas
Imagine receiving an anonymous suicide note addressed to you by mistake. Would you try to find that person, to help…
Poor bewildered beasts
If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to…
The unkindest cult of all
When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the…
Roving the world
In these books, two handsome and popular telly adventurers consider, from viewpoints that are sometimes overly autobiographical, the culture of…
Double trouble
Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after…
The lonely passion of Beatrix Potter
The story of the extraordinary boom in children’s literature over the last 100 years could be bookended with a ‘Tale…
Dark and graphic
A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the…
We’re all snobs really
D.J. Taylor’s clever dissection of snobs is really two books in one. Scattered throughout are entertaining, delicious (initially), solemnly related…
Snow on snow
Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As…
Rhinoceros pie, anyone?
Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto:…
Arms and the woman
In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by…
A girl in a million
All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed…
Little and large
Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier…
Port in any storm
Cometh the hour, cometh the book, and so Christmas brings us once again a tidal wave of titles relating to…
A marvel and a mystery
In 2013, Pavel Dmitrichenko, disgruntled principal dancer of the Bolshoi, exacted a now infamous revenge on the company’s artistic director,…
Love at first bite
Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high…
Spot the British Author
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