Books
Reading and self-reflection
‘Male writers now are the opposition party, and that may not be such a bad thing for them.’ So Rob…
Freedom or death
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has…
The ghosts of academe
It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being…
A late awakening
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
Variations on a theme
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
The trees are on the move
Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land.…
Her own master
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
Once upon a time, long, long ago
Philip Hensher explores the origins of fairy tales
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
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