Books
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…
Thoroughly modern Melanie
This exhilaratingly lowbrow first novel concentrates on money and lust or, to put it more bluntly, sex and the City.…
Gin and boiled cabbage with George Orwell
The Orwellian past is a foreign country; smells are different there. Pipe smoke and carbolic, side notes of horse dung…
The bitchy world of ballet
Memoirs of old men, baldly, tend to be tricky. Sir Peter Wright, one of the founding pillars of the British…
In the gutter, insulting the stars
John McEntee — ‘the Chancer from Cavan’, as he bills himself — has enjoyed a long career as a gossip…
Listen with Mother
Ian McEwan’s novels are drawn to enclosed spaces. There is the squash court upon which the surgeon plays a meticulously…
Revolution was in the air
The Penguin History of Europe reaches its seventh volume (out of nine) with Richard J. Evans’s thorough and wide-ranging work…
Murky subjects, misty settings
A short-story renaissance has been promised since 2013. That year Alice Munro won the Nobel, Lydia Davis won the Booker…
A masterpiece of mesmerising beauty
In the beginning was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, pleached and Proustian, released in February 1960. This was followed soon after,…
Grubby, funny shaggy dog story
The Mexican author Juan Pablo Villa-lobos’s first short novel, Down the Rabbit Hole (Fiesta en la madriguera), was published in…
One scorching summer long ago
It was the brightest of futures; it was the End of Days. Three hundred and fifty years before Brexit, England…
The don’ts of ‘parenting’
In the American way, the child psychologist Alison Gopnik’s new book has an attractive sound-bitey title dragging a flat-footed subtitle…
