Books
The Mann who knew everyone
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
War on Mount Olympus
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
One man’s war through 45 objects
Attempts by soldiers themselves to describe to us our 21st-century wars have come, so far, in a few recognisable varieties:…
Books and Arts opener
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Hat trick
Kipling once wrote a poem lamenting that the three-volume romantic novel (‘The old three-decker’) was said to be extinct. It…
Viewing the view
It’s not all picnics and cowslips. You need sense as well as sensibility to appreciate a landscape, says Mary Keen
The heavens are falling
The dystopian novel in which a Ballardian deluge or viral illness transforms planet Earth has become something of a sub-genre,…
Whatever next?
‘Ah, Jeremy,’ remarked Tony Blair at a smart dinner party in Islington not long before he became prime minister, ‘he…
Beautiful losers
When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short…
One fine spring day
The opening of Graham Swift’s new novel clearly signals his intent. ‘Once upon a time’ tells us that this will…
Putting Germany together again
The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities…
A love letter to Italy
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Escaping the Inferno
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
Burrowed wisdom
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
A box of delights
Juliet Nicolson examines women’s lives and changing fashions through a rich hoard of buttons for all occasions
Raptor rapture
The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for…
Voices of St Joan
I don’t know if this counts as name-dropping, but I recently interviewed a boyhood friend of Elvis Presley’s in Tupelo,…
A plague on all P-words
This isn’t a book to read before lights out. It’s about a mentally ill man whose mother exiles him from…
A people horrible to behold
The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard,…
Stop calling me ‘Goat’
The title of Tim Parks’s 17th novel is false advertising, because Thomas and Mary: A Love Story is barely a…
Rescuing old Nick
In the conclusion to his very substantial study of England’s least known and most misunderstood Baroque architect, Owen Hopkins discusses…
Frozen beards and hot tempers
Born in New South Wales in 1888, George Finch climbed Mount Canobolas as a boy, unleashing, in the thin air,…
The trouble with mothers
For a child, the idea of ‘knowing’ your mother doesn’t compute; she’s merely there. As an adult, there may be…
Sixty years on
The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…
In praise of affectation
Jonathan Beckman 20 February 2016 9:00 am
Aversion to pretentiousness was probably an English trait before Dr Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s arguments for the immateriality of…