Books
Magical mountains
A magnificent new history of the Caucasus earns Peter Frankopan’s highest praise
Weaving stories
What are myths for? Do they lend meaning and value to this quintessence of dust? Like religion, perhaps they help…
A woman in the shadows
When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her…
A thankless task
The final volume of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England feels like a dutiful exercise carried out in a hurry, says Philip Hensher
His true calling
We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or…
Boys who never grew up
I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is…
Darkness and desolation
In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…
No stone left unturned
In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives…
It all streams past
To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
The vast majority of the British public, and even military historians, have never heard of them. COPPists — a combination…
Effortless superiority
It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White…
Jesus & the journo
Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian newspaper, is best known for his shrewd analysis of our country and…
Feat of clay
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
The fiasco of the century
There was certainly no shortage of excellent advice about war in Afghanistan offered to many American leaders by many people over many years, says Justin Marozzi
A ridge too far?
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been…
Anything goes
When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of…
Spirit of place
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…
Souls for sale
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Prophet of disenchantment
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Interpreting for a dictator
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Blood is thicker than water
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
There never was fair play
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
