Books
On a wing and a prayer
‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow…
Books and Arts
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In the bunker
The rusted-on supporters of the ALP must wonder how it came to this. Six years ago, the ALP was on…
Books and arts
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Conspicuous consumption
Margaret MacMillan says that the ostentation of the Edwardian Age focuses the mind painfully on the horror that was so quickly to follow
Blindness and madness
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
Saints and sinners
There is always meat in Michael Arditti’s novels. He is a writer who presents moral problems via fiction but is…
Looking at books
The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two…
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
Crime and no punishment
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Riding for Rwanda
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about…
Waiting for the Train
Early spring cherry blossom by the tracks — so prim and so dirty, all at once. The bees must be…
Waving, not drowning
Conductors love telling stories, especially stories about other conductors, and every chapter of this otherwise determinedly pragmatic book begins with…
Books and Arts
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Victorian values
Philip Hensher says that Churchill’s engagement with the empire does not reveal him at his finest hour
Land of hope and envy
Mark Mills is known for his historical and literary crime novels, including The Savage Garden, The Information Officer and House…
No satisfaction
For Stuart Maconie fans, this book might sound as if it’ll be his masterpiece. In his earlier memoirs and travelogues,…
Good timing
‘Value and worth in any of the arts has always been about timing,’ writes British director Nicolas Roeg at the…
The Italian job
During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish…
In dialogue with the novel
This year marks the fourth Granta ‘Best of Young British novelists’, begun in 1983, but it is the first time…
Wax now works
Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left…
Siempre
After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred…
Notes from a big country
The esteemed literary critic, serial academic and one-time Marxist firebrand Terry Eagleton is, at 70, still producing books at an…
The useful Colonel Houses
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was determined to get the measure of Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, and of Britain’s chances…
Hunting for bogeymen
Here is how you make a conspiracy theory: take a couple of facts, stir in a few assumptions, then add…
