Books
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…
The bane of Albania
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Everyone’s favourite dinosaur
Tyrannosaurus rex is the greatest celebrity of all time. The 68–66 million-year-old carnivore is far older than any actor or…
Nothing quite adds up
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
Black mischief among the Medicis
The life – and violent death – of a very unusual Renaissance prince has Alex von Tunzelmann enthralled
The American dream goes bust
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
All is not lost
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
