Books
Souls for sale
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Prophet of disenchantment
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Interpreting for a dictator
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Blood is thicker than water
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
There never was fair play
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Unheeded warnings
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
No saintly innocent
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Cock and bull stories
The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a…
Everyday miracles
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else
Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much…
Tough old world
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
An isolated misfit
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
Hooray for Hollywood
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it.…
Man of many parts
This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the…
Unwelcome news
A character in David Hare’s Skylight claims she has at last found contentment by no longer opening newspapers or watching…
Bellicose but comradely
One of the first retrospective accounts of Oliver Cromwell’s early career, Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from…
The end of the ride
Audi will make no more fuel engines after 2035. So that’s the end of the Age of Combustion, signalled by…
The roots of conflict
The Island of Missing Trees feels like a strange title until you realise how hard Elif Shafak makes trees work…
Stories within stories within stories
Near to the heart of this wild and labyrinthine novel — on page 516 of 808 — a character in…
A character assassination too far
Revisionist biographies of Churchill are nothing new but this one lays the hostility and contempt on with a trowel, says Andrew Roberts
Nordics and Nazis
Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were…
The man and the brand
‘The story that Jay Parini recounts in Borges and Me is untrue,’ a recent letter in the TLS claimed, ‘and…
