Books
The world’s most exotic languages are vanishing in a puff of smoke
Among the many ‘rare tongues’ explored by Lorna Gibb is the use of smoke signals by native north Americans, the oldest form of long-distance communication
The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise
The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage
A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed
A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’
Clouded memories: Ballerina, by Patrick Modiano, reviewed
An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer
The wonder of the human body
Gabriel Weston intersperses her guide to the structure and functions of the body’s organs with personal anecdotes and moral reflections
Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed
Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on
What Ovid in exile was missing
The poet complained bitterly of the barbarism of Tomis, on the Black Sea – but it was actually a thriving entrepot with a rich culture, like many of the Roman empire’s remoter cities
Liberty is a loaded word
Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint
How Cold War Czechoslovakia became a haven for terrorists
Simply to oppose and aggravate the West, the country supported a range of radical Palestinian organisations – but their violence and unpredictability became serious liabilities
Butchered for feather beds: the brutal end of the great auk
The large, flightless birds that once inhabited the North Atlantic cliffs in their millions were extinct by the 1840s, as the demand for down-filled mattresses increased
Things Fall Apart: Flesh, by David Szalay, reviewed
The fluctuating fortunes of an ambitious young Hungarian in London provide a gripping study of the choices that can make or break a life
The punishing life of a chief whip
Simon Hart describes his frustrations as he grapples with the rivalries and petty jealousies of colleagues lobbying for peerages and knighthoods as the Tory party implodes
A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain
For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects
Wokeness under the Milky Way
Well before Trump’s re-election there were serious signs that woke and identity politics had peaked. In the 2023 blockbuster Harvard…
The world is now inexorably divided – and the West must fight to survive
One side wants to preserve core Judeo-Christian values; the other, driven by Islamist extremists, seeks to establish a dangerous new world of deracinated individuals, says Melanie Phillips
The weirdness of the pre-Beatles pop world
As his mental health declined, the record producer Joe Meek grew increasingly fascinated by the other-worldly, communing in graveyards with Buddy Holly and the Pharaoh Ramses the Great
How can a biography of Woody Allen be so unbearably dull?
Only after 300-plus pages of tedious filmography do we finally get to the rift with Mia Farrow and the family scandals that have dogged Allen ever since
Is Keir Starmer really Morgan McSweeney’s puppet?
Two lobby journalists portray the PM as the pawn of ‘the Irishman’ and as ‘a passenger on a train driven by others’ – but there is much more to Starmer than that
Hope springs eternal: The Café with No Name, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
It’s Vienna, 1966, and a young labourer casts a speculative eye on a ramshackle café in the corner of the Karmelitermarkt, daring to restore it and improve his lot
The Assyrians were really not so different from us
Selena Wisnom shows us children toiling over their writing tablets, taking pride in schoolwork, and a heartbroken scribe finding consolation in literature after the death of his king in battle
Three’s a crowd: The City Changes its Face, by Eimear McBride, reviewed
Tension mounts between young Eily and her 40-year-old partner, Stephen, when Stephen’s daughter, Grace, appears, underlining the couple’s different ages and experiences
Any form of saturation bombing is a stain on humanity
Even before the dropping of ‘Little Boy’, the moral line was crossed with the destruction of almost every major Japanese city by incendiary and cluster bombs filled with napalm
The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa
‘She hates to see anyone put to death’, said one contemporary of the monarch who abolished torture and serfdom and pioneered the practice of open weekly audiences with the public
An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal
Her imaginative, edgy sketches, though lacking technical expertise, often look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era
Why were the security services so obsessed with the Marxist historian Christopher Hill?
MI5 and Special Branch intercepted Hill’s mail for decades, but the former Master of Balliol was an impartial teacher and certainly no Soviet agent
