Books
Too, too shy-making
You might have thought that the last thing shy people need is a book about shyness: a large part of…
A rose between two thorns
Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without…
Exquisite mementoes
All alone on page 313 of this spectacular book, a tattered but heroic flag flies in a painting of an…
The trouble with actors
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a…
Hoarder disorder
The enormous desk on which I am writing this is swamped by four precarious piles of books, one topped by…
The great Dadaist novel
Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless…
A lively, rebellious boy
It is one of the great set-pieces of high drama in English history. The king, shamed by his part in…
Hit and miss
A few years ago, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune stumbled upon what was widely reported as ‘the Holy Grail…
Ghosts of the past
You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted…
Dancing with robots
Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected…
Tangled web
It was John Howard who famously declared that the government would decide who came to Australia to live and in…
Where there’s a will…
‘Clonakilty, God help us,’ my Irish mother would say automatically when we drove into the town, in pious remembrance of…
Why the revolution went off the rails
Assignats are the bane of every student of the French revolution without an economics background. They were the bonds issued…
Listening in to the Russians
There are now enough books about Bletchley Park for it to become part of national mythology, along with the Tudors,…
A life of telling stories
Not all novelists lead a public life. Those who do, however, tend to make a bit of a performance out…
Alone on a wide, wide sea
Some years ago, when I stepped from an unstable boat onto Juan Fernández island, a friendly man took my bag…
Writing on the fly
Bogotá airport, immigration form in hand. Tourist, migrant, businessman? Andrés Neuman ponders the descriptors, unsure which to tick. He opts…
Smaller than life
For Jonathan Safran Foer fans and sceptics alike, Here I Am comes as a wonderful gift, a truly painful, honest…
Exit the Tsar
Helen Rappaport’s new book makes no claim to be a complete account of the Russian revolution. Instead it presents a…
Digging deep into history
The year is 1963. A girl is walking around Stepney with a pack of index cards, visiting old residents in…
No regrets, really?
Never speak on the same platform as Sir Malcolm Rifkind. I tried it once, at a Spectator debate held during…
Champagne all the way
A more appropriate subtitle to this homage to the queen bees of the interwar years might have been ‘How to…
Towards the best of all possible worlds
The flour is what matters, and not the mill, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote in his notebook in 1799. ‘When we…
Paths to fulfillment
You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you…
Tomorrow’s world
It may be difficult to believe when you think of Donald Trump, but the age of super-humans is almost upon…
