Books
Shiver me timbers
Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a character put on his sealskin kamiks, muskrat hat, wolfskin mittens and…
Highly undesirable
Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see them and take them pretty much as they come,…
Fierce indignation
In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When…
The great Soviet gameshow
In the opening chapter of her history of Soviet Central Television, Christine E. Evans observes two Russian televisual displays of…
Walking the walls of Theodosius
Hagia Sophia (the Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Istanbul is arguably the most important building in our Judeo-Christian tradition.…
Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine
We had a fine party at 67 Pall Mall last night to launch the new edition of Simon Hoggart’s Life’s…
Intoxicated with ink
One of the charms and shortcomings of biography is that it makes perfectly normal situations sound extraordinary. According to Michel…
A bit player in the great drama
There’s a glorious scene in Astrid Lindgren’s first Pippi Longstocking book in which her fearless, freckled heroine strides to the…
A matter of life and death
Shades of The Master and Margarita haunt Rabih Alameddine’s sixth book, in which Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet with a day…
Time is of the essence
Christopher Priest, now 73, has been quietly turning out oddly mesmerising fiction for nearly half a century but, like the…
The passionate patriot
To anyone complaining that American politics in 2016 is uncivil, consider this: in 1804, the vice president of the United…
Special K
Our collective attention spans may not be as short as is widely cited, but they are pretty short. Take the…
Apples for our eyes
Apple Day, on 21 October, is a newish festival, created in 1990, by the venerable organisation, Common Ground. Intended to…
In the company of queens
Steven Runciman, the historian of Byzantium, is a puzzling figure. He was an outrageous snob, once remarking that he would…
And the answer is…
Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction…
Behind the fringe
‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three,’ Philip Larkin famously announced in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, ‘Between the end of…
The world in limbo
In 1919 the economist and sometime prophet John Maynard Keynes left the glittering ballroom of Versailles feeling profoundly despondent. The…
Paintbrushes at the ready
When the old curmudgeon Edgar Degas died in 1917, a stunning trove of works by Edouard Manet — eight paintings,…
He blew his mind out in a car
There was a touch of Raymond Radiguet, the young literary sensation of 1920s Paris, about Tara Browne. In life poetically…
Too good to be true
The McNulty family in the novels of Sebastian Barry have a definite claim to be one of the unluckiest in…
His and her healthcare
When I started this book, I have to admit, I did not think it would be as absolutely fascinating as…
England’s unloved king
Aethelred the Unready (c.968—1016) has not, as Levi Roach acknowledges, enjoyed a good press. In recent times there may have…
A parable of good and evil
It is difficult to write well about slavery. As with the Holocaust, the subject’s horrific nature lends itself too easily…
Courting the Iron Lady
This is a strange book. Peter Stothard, the editor of the TLS, is packing up his office. It is a…
A study in alienation
Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story…
