Books
The tsunami of stuff we have and want is based on culture and economics
In 1993, the photographer Peter Menzel travelled across the globe to capture our material world. In each country, he asked…
Hitler’s legacy: two books examine different aspects of the horror that was Germany, 1945
Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way…
What to do to grinning do-gooders
In the 1860s, Australian colonies adopted, virtually unaltered, the English Companies Act 1862. Despite initial distrust of this new corporate…
No one held Susan Sontag in higher esteem than she did: Her Life reviewed
Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing…
A thoroughly modern medieval romance
The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons,…
There’s no place quite like Excellent Essex
Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves…
The Lost Girls of World War II – a tribute
It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s…
A New York state of mind – Doxology reviewed
Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a…
A page-turning work of well-researched history: The Mountbattens reviewed
He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s…
Edna O’Brien’s heroic tribute to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram: Girl reviewed
This novel is strikingly brave in two ways: first, in the fortitude of its writer, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, who,…
One insider’s view of the thorny subject of immigration
Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous…
William Dalrymple has nailed the East India Company for what it was: ‘a supreme act of corporate violence’
A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has…
Tobias Jones finds in Italian football hooliganism a mirror image of Italy itself
Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s…
20th-century assassins – How to be a Dictator reviewed
Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini,…
What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?
Amedeo Modigliani thought Nina Hamnett, muse, painter, memoirist, had ‘the best tits in Europe’. She fell 40 feet from a…
Was there some Freudian symbolism in Lucian’s botanical paintings?
In early paintings such as ‘Man with a Thistle’ (1946), ‘Still-life with Green Lemon’ (1946) and ‘Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot’…
How Britain conned the US into entering the war
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more…
Crazy nannies and missing children: the latest crime fiction reviewed
Madeline Stevens’s debut thriller, Devotion (Faber, £12.99), might more appropriately have been titled ‘Desire’. It’s a riff on that old…
The elegance and humour of Neville Cardus
As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can…
In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War
Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but…
It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene
In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’,…
The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless
The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved…
Carry on up the Zambezi
I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who…
Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?
Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity…
When Decca records were part of everyday life
In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett published his debut hardboiled novel Red Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí began…
