Books

Approaching America

5 February 2015 3:00 pm

Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly…

Approaching America

5 February 2015 3:00 pm

Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly…

Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?

31 January 2015 9:00 am

T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation

The King Kong of the thriller: the phenomenal output of Edgar Wallace, once the world’s most popular author

31 January 2015 9:00 am

At the time of his death in 1932 Edgar Wallace had published some 200 books, 25 plays, 45 collections of…

Persuasions

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura: a masterpiece of German Gothic

31 January 2015 9:00 am

In the early 19th century, the Romantic movement was in full swing across Europe. You could probably date its birth…

Virtually identical in their languorous loucheness. Clockwise from top left: Louise de Kérouaille Barbara Palmer, Moll Davis and Nell Gwyn

The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?

31 January 2015 9:00 am

In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh…

A state of terror: Islamic State longs to be left alone to establish its blood-stained utopia

31 January 2015 9:00 am

The Sykes-Picot agreement will be 100 years old next year, but there will be no congratulatory telegrams winging their way…

The face of evil: Irma Grese, one of the most hated of all camp guards, trained at Ravensbrück before moving to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Survivors testified to her extreme sadism, including her use of trained, half-starved dogs to savage prisoners

Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near,…

Muriel and Nellie: two radical Christians build Jerusalem in London’s East End

31 January 2015 9:00 am

This is the tale of Muriel Lester, once famous pacifist and social reformer, and Nellie Dowell, her invisible friend. Nellie…

‘La Surprise’, 1718–19, by Jean-Antoine Watteau

Books and arts

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

Persuasions

29 January 2015 3:00 pm

Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…

Persuasions

29 January 2015 3:00 pm

Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…

The Prophet Mohammed welcoming Jacob, from ‘Zubdet ut Tevarih’, 1583, by Lokman.

Books and arts

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

King Louis IX embarks for the Crusades

The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism

Lodge: the proof that aspiration does not mean surrendering the virtues of your class

David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man

24 January 2015 9:00 am

This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends…

Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…

Lurid & Cute is too true to its title

24 January 2015 9:00 am

One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…

Maggie Smith as Jocasta in Jean Cocteau’s ‘The Infernal Machine’, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1986

Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex

24 January 2015 9:00 am

What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…

Blikkiesdorp, the shack settlement where Asad lived for the two years during which he and Jonny Steinberg collaborated on the book

Refugees and resilience: a story of Africa

24 January 2015 9:00 am

I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected…

Princess Bamba, Catherine and Sophia Duleep Singh at their debut at Buckingham Palace, 1894

Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian…

A ghost story without the scary bits

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress,…

The best new crime novels (and a rule for enjoying them)

24 January 2015 9:00 am

I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written…

Peking, c. 1290 (private collection), from ‘The Book of Ser Marco Polo’, edited by Henry Yule, 1903

The real mystery is how it got published

24 January 2015 9:00 am

As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…

Making physics history

24 January 2015 9:00 am

The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want…