Books
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
Three brides for three brothers
Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation,…
The best times you’ll never remember
It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health…
Star signs
In 2002 I was living in Berlin. One day my upstairs neighbour Peter told me he had just returned from…
A disaster waiting to happen
Mountains are humanity’s most comforting topographical feature. Wherever you find them you will also find those who have flocked to…
The world on the rocks
Adam Nicolson is one of our finest writers of non-fiction. He has range — from place and history to literature…
The rebirth of a nation
Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…
Finding le mot juste
No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…
A scandalous success
When Caroline Sheridan married George Chapple Norton in 1827 she ceased to exist. According to the legal status quo, as…
Punk pioneer
Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…
Life and death decisions
Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry…
President Xi’s panopticon
Tom Miller describes how Xinjiang became a laboratory for China’s mass surveillance system – built with the help of US tech companies
Let there be light
The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding…
The lure of yellow pages
For almost as long as there have been books, there have been books about books — writers just love to…
Peckham wry
Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the…
Let yourself go
When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour…
The places that make us
In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was…
Disappointment all round
When I interviewed Paul Theroux 21 years ago at his home in Hawaii, there were already rumours that his ex-wife…
Knocking on Shakespeare’s door
I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…
A terrible beauty
Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but…
Ode to LA
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
A fully engaged life
From Bengali schoolboy to citizen of the world – Amartya Sen’s autobiography is a joy, says Philip Hensher
Australian art in the Roaring Twenties
The only criticism that can be levelled at For the Fallen by Paul Paffen is that it lacks the hard…
An imaginative interpretation of the past
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Where’s Leni?
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
