Books
Tales to tell
The short story has long been a staple of Australian literature but has had something of a rough ride in…
Driven to abstraction
Philip Hensher on the perverse, tormented Mark Rothko, whose anger and depression — often painfully apparent in his art — only increased with his success
Songs of praise for the BBC
In a ‘Dear Bill’ letter in Private Eye, an imaginary Denis Thatcher wrote off the BBC as a nest of…
Worshipping the body beautiful
My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…
Feather-footed through the plashy glen
Sir John Lister-Kaye has adopted a very familiar format in his new book of wildlife encounters. Essentially he charts a…
Deep in the heart of darkness
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
English without tears
In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne…
A father goes over the edge
When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of…
A James Bond thriller for real
Ahead of last year’s release of The Interview, the Seth Rogen film about two journalists instructed to assassinate Kim Jong-un,…
No escaping the past
The title of A.D. Miller’s follow-up to his Man Booker shortlisted debut Snowdrops refers not to lovers but to two…
Here comes everything
You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul…
Running around with Marx
Thomas R. Flynn has written an avowedly ‘intellectual biography’ of Jean-Paul Sartre, which might seem fitting. Sartre was nothing if…
Books and arts
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For blackberry, read BlackBerry
It is not only archaic or dialect terms in natural history we’re now missing in everyday speech, says Adam Nicolson. Soon children won’t even know what a dandelion is
A load of old Boltzmann
I’ve got a mathematical problem. Birth of a Theorem is by one of the great geniuses of today, a cosmopolitan,…
While the wound was still raw
For 30 years Kim Gordon was one half of a cool couple in a cool band. With her husband Thurston…
Here be dragons
If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon…
Booked for a world tour
One day in 2011, while perusing her bookshelves, Ann Morgan realised her reading habits were (to her surprise) somewhat parochial.…
Pier pressure
Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s…
Fame and scandal in the family
The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the…
Daffodils
These sprightly flowers are no cowards. They poke forth sun seeking heads, proudly proclaim when earth remains clenched in winter’s…
Books and arts
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Daffodils
These sprightly flowers are no cowards. They poke forth sun seeking heads, proudly proclaim when earth remains clenched in winter’s…
Daffodils
These sprightly flowers are no cowards. They poke forth sun seeking heads, proudly proclaim when earth remains clenched in winter’s…
March of the robots
Will Self 28 February 2015 9:00 am
Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly…