Books
A picture of jealous rivalry: Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock, reviewed
Henri Matisse’s wife and longstanding model was understandably enraged when the artist, in later life, preferred his much younger Russian mistress as a sitter
The importance of honouring the enemy war dead
Local communities who tend the graves of enemy casualties of the two world wars do more for reconciliation than most politicians and diplomats, says Tim Grady
Controlling AI is the great challenge of our age
The genie is only half out of the bottle, says Richard Susskind, but we should be in a state of high alert – and anyone who thinks otherwise is ‘plain daft’
The dogged women on the trail of Dr Crippen
Had it not been for the persistence of Mrs Crippen’s friends at the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, the notorious murderer might have escaped scot free
The adventures of the indomitable Dorothy Mills
The society rebel with a fondness for cross-dressing travelled widely in Africa, South America and the Middle East, dying in 1959, aged 70, with bags packed for the next expedition
The vagaries of laboratory experiments
With much research threatened by flawed methods and misconduct, will AI bring unprecedented scientific progress or merely increase the unreliability problem?
The unfairytale life of two European princesses
Wounded by their husbands’ infidelity and shattered by the deaths of their only sons, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France defied court protocol in a bid for independence
The soldier poet: Viva Byron!, by Hugh Thomson, reviewed
What would have happened had Lord Byron fought for Simon Bolivar in Latin America, rather than dying of fever in Missolonghi, campaigning for Greek independence?
The mystery of the missing man: Green Ink, by Stephen May, reviewed
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Well before Trump’s re-election there were serious signs that woke and identity politics had peaked. In the 2023 blockbuster Harvard…
