Books
Brush up your Polari
A deranged anarchist plans to commit the crime of a century – with Polari, coded messages and a faulty typewriter contributing to the mayhem
Of microbes and men
Jonathan Kennedy explores the (mainly) devastating effects of bacteria in the past – and now, as they proliferate and our resistance diminishes
Jolly good company
There are vignettes of many Cambridge contemporaries – including the mysterious John Sackur, the inspiration for the invisible man in Donkeys’ Years
A reluctant unbeliever
He dismisses the philosophy of religion as sixth-formish point-scoring. But are his own ruminations any more profound?
Farewell to the Belle Époque
Edward VII’s reign is generally seen as a bright interlude between Victorian primness and the Great War – but there was considerable unrest on many fronts
Elizabethan enterprise
After the Amboyna massacre of 1623, the newly-fledged East India Company conceded the spice trade to the Dutch – to focus instead on the riches of India
Woman of mystery
A counterfactual history of modern America serves as a backdrop to the life of the enigmatic ‘X’ – a woman of multiple personae and impenetrable disguises
A nation in turmoil
Twentieth-century Spain was a violent, corrupt and volatile country – but that hardly made it an anomaly within Europe, says Sarah Watling
Writing about leaders
Historian Chris Wallace, who currently holds a professorship at the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of…
Family friction
In the wake of their father’s death, a brother and sister recall the violent domestic dramas of their childhood
Secrets and lies
A merciless ETA terrorist is in hiding in Spain – but which of three seemingly innocent women is she?
After the fall
Timothy Garton Ash weighs the consequences of the push towards a single currency, the West’s dependence for energy on Russia, and Brexit, among much else
A Faustian bargain
Under the much-vaunted new secularism, Muslims were treated as second-class citizens at best - and were often the victims of mass pogroms
Driven to distraction
The buzz of modernity has plagued us since the Industrial Revolution – but even Thoreau tired of practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond
Together and apart
Death permeates these stories, as Nell – a stand-in for Atwood – mourns the loss of her beloved partner Tig
A surreal account of lockdown
A complex novel explores the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible
Performing zeal
If opera is acting, concealing the self behind a character, where does that leave the singer in the concert hall, caught between ventriloquist and dummy, wonders Ian Bostridge
Crowning achievements
From the mass panic of William the Conqueror’s to the drunken mayhem of Victoria’s, few coronations have passed off entirely peacefully
No happy endings
Traditional fairy tales are transposed to a modern setting and given a thrilling – often terrifying – twist
A new world order
Zones of exception, freed from ordinary forms of regulation, are proliferating in bewildering varieties. Kwasi Kwarteng considers the consequences for democracy
Desire and sacrifice
Eliot guarded her privacy closely, but her novels explore themes of sacrifice and restraint, and her heroines are studies in the impossibility of having it all
Quick thinking in the dark
The answer is, we shall never know – but one Norwegian colonel’s quick decision may have ensured Churchill’s premiership and the success of Dunkirk
Growing old disgracefully
Five women in their nineties dine together monthly, keeping loneliness at bay with gossip, advice and reminiscence
Out of the depths
Sexually assaulted as a teenager, Christiana Spens describes her life of perpetual anxiety – until the birth of her son ‘transforms everything’
Alexis the Great
Toby Young is struck by how prescient Tocqueville’s observations have proved on the social and political structures of the many countries he visited
