Books
The selfie from Akhenaten to Tracey Emin
If ever there was a time to write a book about self-portraits, this must be it. ‘Past interest in the…
The talent and tragedy of Richard Pryor
The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via…
Books and Arts
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Cracking up
The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via…
Småland
Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and…
Cracking up
The troubles of Richard Pryor’s life are well known — from his childhood in a brothel to his self-immolation via…
Småland
Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and…
Lawlessness, corruption, poverty and pollution: the city where we're all headed
India’s vast polluted capital, where brutality, corruption and ruthless self-seeking are endemic, could be the blueprint of the future, says Peter Parker
Can anyone make a good case for the Stuart kings?
Historians have generally not been kind in their assessment of Britain’s first two Stuart kings. Their political skills are regarded…
Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects…
Madness and massacre in the jungle
In his new novel, Children of Paradise, Fred D’Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer, returns to the Jonestown massacre, previously the subject…
What other job lets you swear in front of your parents?
There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But…
A master craftsman of the anecdote
One of the many charms of this book is its sheer unexpectedness, which makes it hard to review, for to…
Queen Victoria with the naughty bits put back
Queen Victoria was the inventor of official royal biography. It was she who commissioned the monumental five-volume life of Prince…
The harrowing, inspiring life of Andrew Sachs
Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative…
Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost
In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably…
Middlemarch: the novel that reads you
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search…
On the trail of a Victorian femme fatale
Kate Colquhoun sets herself a number of significant challenges in her compelling new book, Did She Kill Him? Like Kate…
Books and Arts
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Kim Philby got away with it because he was posh
Kim Philby’s treachery escaped detection for so long through the stupidity and snobbery of the old-boy network surrounding him, says Philip Hensher
The Edward Snowden scandal viewed from planet Guardian
Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the…
The spy who came in from le Carré
The single most terrifying moment of my adult life occurred at 8.55 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday 5 August…
Lawrence of Arabia, meet Curt of Cairo
How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a…
Lords, spies and traitors in Elizabeth's England
There are still some sizeable holes in early modern English history and one of them is what we know —…
How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis
Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise…
