Books
Who’s in, who’s out?
From Ladybird’s The Story of Music (a dinky 50 pages, generously illustrated) to Richard Taruskin’s five-volume epic The Oxford History…
Timely tales of pestilence
Professor David Damrosch, the director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, fell in love with ‘a fictional realm that I’d…
Feathered friends
Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and…
Shades of grey
In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of…
A double thriller
‘Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’ The much quoted words of Rodion Raskolnikov, the…
Unlucky in love
James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more…
Anything for a laugh
‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in…
The modern pantheon
In January 1780 the news reached London that Captain Cook had been killed and eaten in Hawaii. The story of…
The translator’s art
‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’ Despite appearing in Essays Two, the…
The year of living dangerously
Atrocities, assassinations and spectacular accidents were just some of the horrors that marked 1922, says Richard Davenport-Hines
Summer books
2021: grit your teeth and read a good book
Girls, girls, girls
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
Nyet to Dr No
Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…
Tuber fever
Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…
Seriously deluded
A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got…
Vignettes to treasure
Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As…
Spot the book title 2021
For answers, click here Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Smoke and mirrors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
Revenge is rarely sweet
‘Who,’ asks Stephen Bayley, in one of the ‘S.B’ chapters of this irresistibly spiky co-written book, ‘could countenance working for…
Face value
Rising professors do well to be controversial if they wish to be invited to contribute to mainstream media. But the…
Ships of heaven
In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our…
The message in Klingon
The Rosetta Stone has an awful lot in common with a Kinder Surprise Egg. Hear me out. The actual text…
Back to the Dark Ages
She’s done it again: J.K. Rowling has written a captivating children’s book. The Christmas Pig(Little Brown, £20) is about a…
Wrong time and place
Dan Rhodes’s career might be regarded as an object lesson in How Not to Get Ahead in Publishing. Our man…
The Bible retold
Robert Alter 18 December 2021 9:00 am
Robert Alter is both exasperated and beguiled by Roberto Calasso’s intellectual potpourri