Books
Persuasions
Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…
Persuasions
Persuasions of shattered glass, fifty rounds bringing carnage, injury, terror, bereavement. What can preserve the State? Citizen A calls an…
Books and arts
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The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind
Sean McGlynn is delighted by a cultural journey through the Middle Ages, replete with philosophy, heresy and mysticism
David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man
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
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
One of the duties of a reviewer is to alert potential readers to the flavour and content of a book,…
Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex
What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…
Refugees and resilience: a story of Africa
I would love to sit in on a Jonny Steinberg interview. Over the years this South African writer has perfected…
Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist
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
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)
I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written…
The real mystery is how it got published
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…
Making physics history
The European philosophical tradition, Alfred North Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. If you really want…
A major-general names the guilty men
The author of this primer to the long-overdue Chilcot report, a retired sapper (Royal Engineers) major-general, nails his colours to…
The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar
One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear…
Buffoonery
Not so much striding across the political landscape as huffing and puffing his way through the back rooms, Clive Palmer…
A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
An ill-waged war against the war on drugs
Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those…
Politics as an aphrodisiac: the secret of the Disraelis’ happy marriage
The long, happy and unlikely marriage of the great Conservative leader Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne, 12 years his…
William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?
In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had…
The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam
News of Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission caused such a stir that the book was pirated online before publication. David Sexton reports on the latest literary event in France
Title Stories: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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Time-travel, smugglers, arsenic — what’s not to like in Sally Gardner’s novel for teenagers?
Which of us, as an adolescent, did not experience at some point a terrible sense of not belonging? Which of…
Patrick George: painting some of his best work at 91
‘If I see something I like I wish to tell someone else; this… is why I paint.’ Patrick George is…
