Books
On Moses’s mountain
A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim…
An Oxford treasure trove
‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled…
Last laughs
A card in a shop window — ‘non-unionised, auxiliary nurses sought… 35p per hour. Ideal for outgoing compassionate females’ —…
Burning passions
This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…
Books & arts
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Laws that changed the world
Prosecution for genocide or crimes against humanity is now a given in international law. But before the Nuremberg Trials, these two groundbreaking notions didn’t exist. Daniel Hahn describes their origins and inspiration
Recent children’s books
Martin Stewart’s Riverkeep (Penguin, £7.99) has a list of books and writers on the cover: Moby-Dick, The Wizard of Oz,…
Wishful thinking
Deirdre McCloskey has been at work for many years on a huge project: to explain why the world has become…
Dante’s egomania
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Strategies for seduction
The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously)…
The cryonics game
Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and…
Wars on drugs
‘Of all civilisation’s occupational categories, that of soldier may be the most conducive to regular drug use.’ The problem with…
Elizabeth alone
If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young…
Pride, prejudice, celebrity…
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short…
… and sense and sensibility
Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
The Feelgood factor
When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who…
The feast before the famine
If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was…
Books and arts opener
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Throned on her hundred isles
It took the madness of genius to build such a wonderful impossibility. Patrick Marnham reviews a delightful new literary guide to Venice
The dog it was that died
Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the…
The grit in the oyster
Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George…
One day, two lonely people
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Rewriting holy writ
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
Goodbye to all that
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
