Books
A cinematic offer we could not refuse
Francis Ford Coppola’s superb film The Godfather changed American cinema and, by extension, American culture. The film had it all:…
From mystery cult to mass movement
Mutilated, strangled, suffocated or beaten to death: these are just some of the methods used to get rid of popes…
‘As capricious as a wild mare’
In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…
It’s all go in Wormingford
Ronald Blythe, the celebrated author of Akenfield, is to turn 100 next month, and to mark his centenary a beguiling…
Shock and awe
‘Astonish me!’ was the celebrated demand that the impresario Sergei Diaghilev made of Jean Cocteau when he was devising Erik…
The less said the better
Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in…
Mitfordian mischief
It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…
We love you, Uncle Xi!
Tom Miller on the cult of personality that China’s ‘core leader’ has so ruthlessly constructed
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…
