Books

The wonder of the human body

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

8 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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?

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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?

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

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

1 March 2025 9:00 am

‘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

22 February 2025 9:00 am

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?

22 February 2025 9:00 am

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

A gloom-laden tale: The Foot on the Crown, by Christopher Fowler reviewed

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Returning to his roots in horror fiction, Fowler portrays Londinium as a dismal citadel, ruled by an enfeebled dynasty clinging to pointless rituals

A mild diversion for a wet afternoon: Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler, reviewed

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Tyler is known for making the ordinary compelling, but this quiet tale of family relationships is subtle to the point of stupor

The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film

22 February 2025 9:00 am

The octogenarian writer seems unable to resist the burlesque, describing the most lurid encounters at an apparently droll remove

Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Howard Amos portrays a once hopeful country now sweeping the past under the carpet as it alternates between pitying itself and pitting itself against the rest of the world