Books

The mystery of the missing man: Green Ink, by Stephen May, reviewed

15 March 2025 9:00 am

Things look bad for the former socialist MP Victor Grayson after he threatens to expose David Lloyd George’s cash for honours scandal in 1920

The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller

15 March 2025 9:00 am

When post-natal depression descends, Lucy Mangan describes reaching for Lee Child, finding catharsis in his no-nonsense villain-bashing

Survival of the cruellest in 16th-century Constantinople

15 March 2025 9:00 am

It was kill or be killed for the Ottoman sultan’s heirs in a bizarre succession ritual involving the ruthless culling of close relatives

The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke

15 March 2025 9:00 am

Among the many ‘rare tongues’ explored by Lorna Gibb is the use of smoke signals by native north Americans, the oldest form of long-distance communication

The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise

15 March 2025 9:00 am

The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage

A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed

8 March 2025 9:00 am

A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’

Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed

8 March 2025 9:00 am

An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer

The wonder of the human body

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Gabriel Weston intersperses her guide to the structure and functions of the body’s organs with personal anecdotes and moral reflections

Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on

What Ovid in exile was missing

8 March 2025 9:00 am

The poet complained bitterly of the barbarism of Tomis, on the Black Sea – but it was actually a thriving entrepot with a rich culture, like many of the Roman empire’s remoter cities

Liberty is a loaded word

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint

How Cold War Czechoslovakia became a haven for terrorists

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Simply to oppose and aggravate the West, the country supported a range of radical Palestinian organisations – but their violence and unpredictability became serious liabilities

Butchered for feather beds: the brutal end of the great auk

8 March 2025 9:00 am

The large, flightless birds that once inhabited the North Atlantic cliffs in their millions were extinct by the 1840s, as the demand for down-filled mattresses increased

Things Fall Apart: Flesh, by David Szalay, reviewed

8 March 2025 9:00 am

The fluctuating fortunes of an ambitious young Hungarian in London provide a gripping study of the choices that can make or break a life

The punishing life of a chief whip

8 March 2025 9:00 am

Simon Hart describes his frustrations as he grapples with the rivalries and petty jealousies of colleagues lobbying for peerages and knighthoods as the Tory party implodes

A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain

8 March 2025 9:00 am

For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects

Wokeness under the Milky Way

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Well before Trump’s re-election there were serious signs that woke and identity politics had peaked. In the 2023 blockbuster Harvard…

The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive

1 March 2025 9:00 am

One side wants to preserve core Judeo-Christian values; the other, driven by Islamist extremists, seeks to establish a dangerous new world of deracinated individuals, says Melanie Phillips

The weirdness of the pre-Beatles pop world

1 March 2025 9:00 am

As his mental health declined, the record producer Joe Meek grew increasingly fascinated by the other-worldly, communing in graveyards with Buddy Holly and the Pharaoh Ramses the Great

How can a biography of Woody Allen be so unbearably dull?

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Only after 300-plus pages of tedious filmography do we finally get to the rift with Mia Farrow and the family scandals that have dogged Allen ever since

Is Keir Starmer really Morgan McSweeney’s puppet?

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Two lobby journalists portray the PM as the pawn of ‘the Irishman’ and as ‘a passenger on a train driven by others’ – but there is much more to Starmer than that

Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

1 March 2025 9:00 am

It’s Vienna, 1966, and a young labourer casts a speculative eye on a ramshackle café in the corner of the Karmelitermarkt, daring to restore it and improve his lot

The Assyrians were really not so different from us

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Selena Wisnom shows us children toiling over their writing tablets, taking pride in schoolwork, and a heartbroken scribe finding consolation in literature after the death of his king in battle

Three’s a crowd: The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride, reviewed

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Tension mounts between young Eily and her 40-year-old partner, Stephen, when Stephen’s daughter, Grace, appears, underlining the couple’s different ages and experiences

Any form of saturation bombing is a stain on humanity

1 March 2025 9:00 am

Even before the dropping of ‘Little Boy’, the moral line was crossed with the destruction of almost every major Japanese city by incendiary and cluster bombs filled with napalm