Books
The struggle to put bread on the table
Wheat flour, and the bread made from it, has been a recurring cause of concern for the British for centuries,…
The sister from hell
A while ago, Samantha Markle declared that her forthcoming book would be about ‘the beautiful nuances of our lives’. Was…
More magical thinking
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
‘Just a poor boy – like me’
As the Great War unfolds, voices we don’t usually hear describe with a terrible raw honesty the realities of their experience, says David Crane
In the trenches
I can hardly recall a more engaging and uplifting biography than this life of Major-General William Holmes, who was killed…
Dying of shame
In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches…
Moi… Lolita
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
And then there were three
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
Tact and tactics
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
The tarnished city on the hill
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Not long for this Erth
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Real life breaks in
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and…
Rocks of ages
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
When poison is the cure
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was…
Diabolical twists
This is not the age of experimental fiction — it’s Franzen’s, not Foster Wallace’s. That shift was on its cusp…
The great carve-up
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…
Yummy mummy
Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from…
The curse of Cain
When police were called to a block of flats in north London at the beginning of 2002, they expected to…
Missing the big picture
In 1953, Francis Bacon’s friends Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwood were concerned about the painter’s health. His liver was in…
Reinventing the superhero
If Marvel characters seem dysfunctional, just look at their creators, says Dorian Lynskey
Hard times for the arts
As readers of a certain age will realise, Looking for a New England derives its title from ‘A New England’,…
A thoroughly modern Romantic
Keats is a much stranger poet than we tend to realise – who shocked his first readers by his vulgarity and gross indecency, says Philip Hensher
No room at the top
‘Whatever your background,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Sun’s readers in 1983, she was determined that ‘you have a chance to…
Apocalypse then
Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for…
No regrets
Kim Philby once remarked to the journalist Murray Sayle that ‘to betray, you must first belong. I never belonged’. Kim,…
