Books

The contagions of the modern world

5 October 2024 9:00 am

Disturbing trends in American healthcare, higher education, opioid use and crime come under scrutiny in Malcolm Gladwell’s sequel to The Tipping Point

Man of mystery and friend of the Cambridge spies

5 October 2024 9:00 am

Details of Baron Talbot of Malahide’s attempts to clean up the mess left by his one-time mentor Guy Burgess are still conveniently exempted from the Freedom of Information Act

Voices from Gaza, historic city in ruins

5 October 2024 9:00 am

Accounts of the current bombings and the daily search for fuel, food and water are by turns heartbreaking, terrified, resilient and defiant – and cling to the hope of a peaceful future

A wish-fulfilment romance: Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Rooney’s fourth novel is another case of compare and contrast, with various pairings of anxious characters struggling through their twenties and thirties in picturesque Dublin

The hare-raising experience that changed my life

28 September 2024 9:00 am

When Chloe Dalton adopts an abandoned new-born leveret, she soon finds her domestic routine radically altered

The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Writing from opposite sides, Leo Tolstoy and William Howard Russell exposed the horror of conditions in a quagmire war which seemed to have no meaning

How the Rillington Place murders turned Britain into a nation of ghouls

28 September 2024 9:00 am

With titillating newspaper coverage making John Christie’s trial a hot ticket, everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of the house of horror – or even break in

The mystery of female desire deepens

28 September 2024 9:00 am

When Gillian Anderson appealed to women to send her their sexual fantasies, she guaranteed strict anonymity – prompting a ‘torrent of unbridled passion from across the world’

When Britannia ceased to rule the waves

28 September 2024 9:00 am

The final volume of N.A.M. Rodger’s magisterial history documents the gradual decline of Britain’s naval power as the empire disintegrated

A dark satanic cult: The Third Realm, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Knausgaard’s unsettling novel continues to explore previous themes in the series, including the strange phenomenon of the black metal music scene in socially balanced Norway

Starving street urchins sell their sisters in the chaos of Naples, 1944

28 September 2024 9:00 am

When the Allies arrived in the city in the wake of the German retreat, they were shocked by the child prostitutes, shady commerce and downright miseria

The flowering of enlightenment under Oliver Cromwell

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Far from being a puritanical wasteland, revolutionary Britain saw the foundation of the Oxford Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who bridged the political divide of the times

Is now the most exciting point in human history?

28 September 2024 9:00 am

Since today’s computers can process information beyond human capabilities, we are on a precipice never faced before, says Yuval Noah Harari, in another sweeping narrative

Nothing was off-limits for ‘the usual gang of idiots’ at Mad

21 September 2024 9:00 am

First published in 1952, the satirical magazine helped free the American youth of Vietnam War era of some of the stupidest beliefs they were supposed to hold about their country

The sad story of the short-lived Small Faces

21 September 2024 9:00 am

The influential 1960s rock band should have enjoyed the longevity of the Rolling Stones. But disputes with managers over low record royalties led to frustration, tension and disillusionment

Mysteries and misogyny: The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann’s masterpiece The Magic Mountain in this ‘health resort horror story’ set in a Silesian guesthouse on the eve of the first world war

The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Hailed as ‘an uncompromising witness to the modern travails of the spirit’ , Weil also exasperated those closest to her with her ambitions for heroic self-denial

Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers

21 September 2024 9:00 am

The billionaires currently driving technology and the global economy are willing to take bets on very long odds, and treat everything as a market to be played

Unrecorded lives: Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

The pandemic’s aftershocks are still felt in Crosby, as Strout’s best-loved characters, Olive, Lucy, Jim and Bob, reminisce about people they have known, imbuing their lives with meaning

Heartbreaking scenes: Annihilation, by Michel Houellebecq, reviewed

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Set in 2027, with France in a state of economic and moral decay, Houellebecq’s deeply affecting novel is really a meditation on love and death and the way we treat the dying

Bones, bridles and bits – but where’s the horse?

21 September 2024 9:00 am

Ancient equine remains provide fascinating clues to migration and warfare – but the animals themselves seem largely absent in William T. Taylor’s history of the horse

The SAS explode from the shadows in six days that shook Britain

21 September 2024 9:00 am

The siege of the Iranian embassy in London in the spring of 1980 achieved nothing for the terrorists. But the previously reclusive elite army unit soon became the stuff of legend

From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby

14 September 2024 9:00 am

The plump teenager who married Randolph Churchill soon turned herself into a ravishing beauty – to become the 20th century’s most influential seductress

Undercover in the Dordogne: Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, reviewed

14 September 2024 9:00 am

An American spy-for-hire uses her feminine wiles to infiltrate an eco-warrior group in rural France. But will she go off-piste and become indoctrinated?

The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed

14 September 2024 9:00 am

An ambitious young black woman working for a charitable trust clashes with its white octogenarian founder over what each thinks they deserve