Books
Chiselled beauty
‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated,…
Missing chapters
Between them, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have a wealth of research and writing experience, and their biography of…
On the edge
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
Theft by stealth
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
The world held its breath
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in…
More grand projects
Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane
Family feeling
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Mission to Mars
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
The great image-maker
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
A tendency to intolerance
Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give…
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
Eliminate the positive
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
Painted out
Sixty years ago, women were still excluded from the art history canon, says Laura Freeman
As time goes by
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Problems of communication
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
A necessary evil
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Prepare for take-off
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
Lost for words
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
Putting on a brave face
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Puzzle pieces
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Trailing clouds of glory
So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s,…
A sting in the tail
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
Well-trodden ways
Hidden away in the Old City of Jerusalem is a tattoo parlour which has been serving pilgrims for the past…
In Aslan’s country
Philip Womack 1 May 2021 9:00 am
C. S. Lewis’s enchanting Chronicles of Narniaseries has, in recent years, come under critical fire. It’s racist, sexist, colonialist; blatant…