Books
A Tuscan gem
Siena, the jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened…
Our understanding disability
This book reveals one man’s determination to enable his brother to live his best life. It is also a fable…
Among hawks and doves
Adapt or die. That brutal Darwinian dictum is too blunt to serve as the motto of Dinosaurs, Lydia Millet’s slim,…
Three brave pioneers
The first three women doctors on the medical register in the UK had not only to study harder than their…
Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
Temples of delight
There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…
Secret assignations
Adam Sisman on the private life of John le Carré, revealed in letters and a kiss-and-tell
Fool’s gold
With Australia heading toward a referendum next year on a constitutionally enshrined indigenous ‘voice’ to parliament, the need for a…
Never the bride
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
‘A really complicated person’
Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her…
Isolating with the ex
Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…
Cries and whispers
Place and story are little remembered now. The rectory in Essex was severely damaged by fire in 1939. But any…
Recherché reading
Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous…
A deadly vacuum
Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…
The road less travelled
How best to write a book about the Himalayas when Mount Everest has been reduced to just another tick-off on…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
Dangerous myth-makers
Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas…
Our private terrors
Every summer, during our holiday in Orkney, there is a moment of panic. We’re standing on a dizzying cliff –…
His own worst enemy
The Radetzky March must be one of the dozen greatest European novels – but its author was frighteningly unpleasant, says Philip Hensher
The Middle East maelstrom
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
Loved and lost
Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the…
The roots of German militarism
It is the contention of Peter Wilson, professor of the history of war at Oxford University and the author of…
Man of many parts
William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the…
A complicated bond
When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising…
The ultimate gamble
This is an important and topical book. Mary Sarotte traces the difficult course of Russia’s relations with Europe and the…
