Books
Double thinking, double lives
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
Between duty and desire
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
Running out of time
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
An American Wodehouse
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
The glory that was Greece
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
The song of the sirens
The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid,…
Between Heaven and ‘L’
A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s…
Master of vitriol
‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…
When the journey, not the arrival, mattered
Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding.…
Books and arts opener
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Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
The man who wrecked New York
John R. MacArthur on the bureaucratic titan who gratuitously bulldozed a great city and displaced and demoralised half a million of its inhabitants
Toxic fun with Mum and Dad
In 2008, when Taylor Wilson was 14, he created a working nuclear fusion reactor, ‘a miniature sun on earth’. At…
One helluva racket
For a music fan, the quiz question, ‘Who wrote “This Land is Your Land”?’ might seem laughably easy. Yet if…
Love it or loathe it
At the heart of the eschatological ideology of the Islamic State is the belief that when the world ends (and…
The real theatre of war
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
Detroit’s new colonials
In the opening sentence of this subtle and finely poised novel, the narrator, Greg Marnier, known as ‘Marny’, admits that…
The raffish toff with a winning Formula
Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers,…
Their heads in the clouds
As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple…
A little loving irony
It doesn’t mean much to say that Renata Adler’s journalism isn’t as interesting as her novels — almost nothing is…
The oldest sport in the world
This is the best book you’ll ever read about mixed martial arts fighting; and this will still be the case…
Cold-blooded
An unidentified lizard, the same size as a Grecian stick, the colour of dirtied sand, holds the dissolving power of…
