Books
On the track of a great fiddle
An extraordinary omission from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is the lyre, the instrument closest…
A spiteful muse
Monica Jones certainly proved Philip Larkin’s equal for racism and misogyny, says Andrew Motion
Quite contrary
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
A daughter’s duty
There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the…
Rage on the page
As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan…
Encircling gloom
When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…
Apostle of modernism
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
Plunder from the palace
A book about the looted African art known as the Benin Bronzes begins by clarifying that most of them are…
Wolves in sheep’s clothing
The #MeToo movement isn’t all it seems. More than three years after countless sexual abuse allegations shook the world, the…
Communing with a great artist
Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed…
Less than angelic
Vicars, tea parties and village fetes were a far cry from Barbara Pym’s early enthusiasms, Philip Hensher reveals
A worthy winner
To an observant outsider, the Soviets might have appeared to have developed an oddly intolerant attitude towards stray dogs. Every…
The great adventuress
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
Everyday inspiration
‘One of the nicest things about being a writer,’ Shirley Jackson once noted in a lecture titled ‘How I Write’,…
The worst of times
Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest…
Wicked wit
The title alludes to Jonathan Meades’s first collection of criticism, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, and to the album by…
From beyond the grave
Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…
The time of our lives
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
The voice of a generation
Bob Dylan didn’t just assimilate the Great American Songbook – he vastly increased its size and variety, says Andrew Motion
Constitutional rights and wrong
No one can accuse Linda Colley of shying away from big subjects. This one is as big as they come…
What it is to be English
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
Gardening frenzy
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
The scholar and the gypsy
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
The weekend cottage in the woods
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
The parent trap
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
