Books

The masque of life

4 March 2023 9:00 am

The actors who appear to be doing nothing are now the ones most revered – but acting is natural, says David Thomson: it’s what we all do all the time

The battle for the Nile

4 March 2023 9:00 am

The explorers’ journey to solve the great geographical puzzle of the Victorian age, and the bad blood it resulted in, is described in gripping detail by Candice Millard

A modern witch-hunt

4 March 2023 9:00 am

For centuries, elderly women have been scorned as crones, hags and scolds – but it’s not only men who are belittling them now, says Victoria Smith

The problem of our insignificance

4 March 2023 9:00 am

Alexander Masters examines the top down cosmology proposed by Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog

Dismantling the Aboriginal industry

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Integration into a wider society works. That is why Australia is one of the most successful countries on the planet.…

Sisters in arms

25 February 2023 9:00 am

‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because’, said the American writer Josephine Herbst – just one of the sisterhood to become immersed in the struggle

Mining gold

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Single volumes that fitted in a knapsack sustained many soldiers in the world wars, and have inspired countless schoolchildren to learn poems by heart

A grief ago

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Bernard Wasserstein describes the dreadful fate of Jews in Krakowiec in the 1940s – and is astonished that a statue has been erected there to one of their chief persecutors

Majestic survivors

25 February 2023 9:00 am

The lifespans of cedars, oaks and yews are remarkable enough, but they pale in comparison to America’s bristlecone pines

Heroes and villeins

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Chaucer’s motley crew help to encapsulate the richness and diversity of the late-medieval world and its growing literacy, says Ian Mortimer

The impossible subject

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Two respected family men are each burdened by an unacceptable private life, in a debut novel based on the experiences of John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis

Opposites attract

25 February 2023 9:00 am

A young guerrilla gardener and an American billionaire vie for a plot of land in New Zealand. Can they trust one another to reach an agreement?

Falling on deaf ears

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Leah Broad celebrates four pioneering musicians who battled male prejudice throughout the past century – yet the situation remains stubbornly unchanged

Strange noises from upstairs

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Trapped abroad during lockdown, a lackadaisical reviewer is spurred to investigate the mysterious noises coming from the floor above his hotel suite

The trapdoor opens

25 February 2023 9:00 am

In a powerful and ultimately heartening memoir, the Oxford professor describes being trapped in a mutinous body, and what it does to the spirit

The clock is ticking fast

25 February 2023 9:00 am

Our own actions have created the toxic prison in which we now live, says Peter Frankopan, and the future looks terrifying. Adam Nicolson can only agree

Guns and roses

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The novelist and travel writer reflects on the resilience of the human spirit in countries whose staggering beauty has largely been trashed

Triumphs and disasters

18 February 2023 9:00 am

It was a year packed with drama – from the transatlantic crossing of the SS Great Britain to the start of the Irish potato blight that would leave millions starving

A case of underexposure

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The biographer and journalist was always reluctant to write about herself, and this posthumously published memoir is hemmed in by what she kept locked away

Man of many parts

18 February 2023 9:00 am

The learning on display in this latest Collected Non-Fiction is as astonishing as ever – though ‘B-sides and Rarities’ might describe the more marginal pieces

The plight of Wales

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Exploring stretches of the country’s Roman road, Tom Bullough notes how climate change and environmental degradation are seriously threatening the landscape

From babe to matriarch

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Even the serious abuse she suffered as a small child and a teenager is described without a trace of self-pity

A Caribbean mystery

18 February 2023 9:00 am

When a rich farmer goes missing and his young wife seeks the protection of an impoverished labourer, the consequences are disastrous

Doctor in despair

18 February 2023 9:00 am

A surgeon from Kashmir is tormented by the penal operations he once performed under Sharia law, such as amputations for robbery

The other side of the coin

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows