Books

The chilly charm of Clarissa Eden

23 November 2024 9:00 am

Glamorous, enigmatic and well read, Anthony Eden’s wife was a discreet but unmistakable influence in Downing Street in the mid-1950s

A century of Hollywood’s spectacular flops

23 November 2024 9:00 am

From D.W. Griffiths’s 1916 epic Intolerance to Tom Hooper’s hilariously misjudged Cats, 26 films provide cautionary examples of mega-budget hubris

The boundless curiosity of Oliver Sacks

23 November 2024 9:00 am

The neurologist’s diverse interests – from colour blindness to cephalopods – are strikingly evident in letters to family, friends and patients, as well as his unfailing courtesy and compassion

Is it time for Jordan Peterson to declare his spiritual allegiance?

23 November 2024 9:00 am

In an outstanding study of the Old Testament, Peterson teases out the inner meaning of one story after another. But though in effect signed up to Christian metaphysics, his beliefs are a mystery

What will the cities of the future look like?

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Will they be subterranean, to escape extreme heat; or float in the sky, to avoid overcrowding; or abolish streets entirely, like the Line, now under construction in Saudi Arabia?

Blooming marvellous: the year’s best gardening books

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Subjects include Catesby’s Natural History, London’s lost green spaces, planting for colour in borders and the complexity of a garden’s ecology38

The fresh hell of Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Though well paid as a screenwriter, Parker lampooned Hollywood’s moguls, dubbing MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Merde as she slipped further into alcoholism

Who would be a goalkeeper?

16 November 2024 9:00 am

There’s a whiff of hauteur in Robert McCrum’s history of the penalty kick – his great-grandfather’s brainchild of 1891, which proved such a momentous change to football

A quest for retribution: Fire, by John Boyne, reviewed

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Freya, a respected consultant in a burns unit, is on a secret mission to destroy as many young boys’ lives as possible, having been raped by teenagers on holiday in Cornwall at the age of 12

South Asia in a time of the breaking of nations

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Avinash Paliwal’s gripping tale of espionage opens in 1949, with newly independent India, Pakistan and Burma racked by rivalries in one of the most intricately partitioned areas on Earth

The ambassador’s daughter bent on betrayal

16 November 2024 9:00 am

When the young Martha Dodd arrived at the American embassy in Berlin in 1933 she cared nothing about politics. By the time she left four years later, she was a committed Soviet spy

Seeds of hope in the siege of Leningrad

16 November 2024 9:00 am

A Russian biologist’s dream of creating the world’s first seed bank is thwarted by Stalin’s paranoia and the Nazi invasion. But the pioneering project remains a potent symbol of hope

Reading the classics should be a joy, not a duty

16 November 2024 9:00 am

Edwin Frank’s survey of 20th-century fiction stresses the po-faced seriousness of the great novel. But many masterpieces revel in the ridiculous – or are about nothing at all

The shame of being an alcoholic mother

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Julia Hamilton and her daughter Arabella Byrne share their experiences of an addiction that seemed ‘baked into them like a curse’, and the special stigma they felt attached to them

The agonies of adolescence: The Party, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

9 November 2024 9:00 am

In post-war Bristol, two sisters fall in with a group of arrogant young men and soon feel themselves painfully inferior

‘Life was good, very good, almost too good’ – Wallis Simpson’s year in China

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Arriving in Shanghai in the summer of 1924, the elegant 28-year-old embarked on a busy but harmless life of pleasure which would later be cast as a wild debauch

Kate Bush – always quite hippy, dippy, ‘out there’

9 November 2024 9:00 am

With Bush, the unexpected is about the only certainty, having the bravado to do what she wants rather than pandering to the public’s longing for hits

‘If you steal this book I’ll beat your brains out’

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Curses on the book thief from Latin and Old English sources range from the venomous to the sadistic to the mind-twistingly gruesome

Stalemate over Taiwan is the best we can hope for

9 November 2024 9:00 am

A good outcome is the tacit recognition on all sides that we currently lack the means to solve this intractable problem, says the former diplomat Kerry Brown

Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Games are politics you can touch, says Tim Clare, and a well-designed boardgame can provide a critical experience of society’s systems

The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Given a new lease of life by John le Carré’s son, George Smiley gets embroiled in a murky affair involving the Circus’s key Stasi asset and a missing Hungarian literary agent

Saint Joan and saucy Eve: a single woman split in two

9 November 2024 9:00 am

The relationship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz is memorably captured in Lily Anolik’s red-hot, propulsive portrait of two warring writers who were once close friends

Were the Arctic convoy sacrifices worth it?

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Stalin privately admitted that his army could never have triumphed without western aid, and the convoys also indirectly helped the war in the Atlantic – but the loss of life was horrendous

Doppelgangers galore: The Novices of Lerna, by Angel Bonomini, reviewed

9 November 2024 9:00 am

A graduate from Argentina, offered a six-month fellowship in Switzerland, is appalled to meet – and have to live with - 24 versions of himself

Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre

9 November 2024 9:00 am

Emmanuel Carrère knows when to let the horrors speak for themselves in his moving, hard-hitting account of the trial of the perpetrators