Books
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…
The fear behind the Terror
Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr
Futurist at a dead end
Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response…
Suffering in style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
The man who disappeared
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…
Lights flash — rockets go off — a star is born
The crucial thing to remember about the music business is that it’s a business. If you happen to be creating…
The absolute pits
Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word…
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…