Books
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Mystic multitudes
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
Alfred the Great
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
This other Eden
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Trump’s legal eagle is candid
There may have been irregularities in the processing and counting of ballots that warranted official investigation
How to see off the grumps
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never…
Friction and fieldwork
To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to…
A gay time by the sea
In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…
The Everybody Inn
What do you do when you pass someone sleeping or begging in the street? I’ll tell you what I do:…
Tudorbethan hell
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
The not-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
Sweet and sour
Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they…
The state and the Union
A ‘global’ history of Scotland must, by its very nature, be one of Britain and Empire too, says Alex Massie
The only gay in the village
In Jon Ransom’s debut novel, water seeps into the crevices between waking and dreaming, flooding the narrator Joe’s consciousness. Set…
A call to farms
Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood.…
Of man and misery
Do not be deterred, but do be warned. Rogues isn’t a book book: it’s a kind of high-end sizzle reel,…
Uncovering the female past
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s…
Grim prospects ahead
We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and…
The outlaw river
It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length…
Siege mentality
Take the Red Line north, heading out of St Petersburg, and you’ll eventually reach Courage Square on the city’s outskirts…
Who needs the metaverse?
Big tech might tell us it’s what’s coming next but as yet there’s no real use for it, says James Ball
What bow – and why is it burning?
‘Jerusalem’ may be our unofficial national anthem, but don’t ask anyone who sings it to tell you what it means, says Philip Hensher
A death-haunted city
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
