Books
From cradle to grave
You need to be wary of being too flattering about English churches. As John Betjeman said: ‘Be careful before you…
A stunning revelation
Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me.…
Sacred and dammed
It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset,…
A sly old fox
Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book…
A dangerous madness
The QAnon conspiracy theory may be absurd, but it can’t be ignored. It has already led to significant acts of violence, says Damian Thompson
No clowning around
What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…
Bitter pills to swallow
What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is…
The thunderclap moment
For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
Three brides for three brothers
Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation,…
The best times you’ll never remember
It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health…
Star signs
In 2002 I was living in Berlin. One day my upstairs neighbour Peter told me he had just returned from…
A disaster waiting to happen
Mountains are humanity’s most comforting topographical feature. Wherever you find them you will also find those who have flocked to…
The world on the rocks
Adam Nicolson is one of our finest writers of non-fiction. He has range — from place and history to literature…
The rebirth of a nation
Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…
Finding le mot juste
No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…
A scandalous success
When Caroline Sheridan married George Chapple Norton in 1827 she ceased to exist. According to the legal status quo, as…
Punk pioneer
Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…
Life and death decisions
Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry…
President Xi’s panopticon
Tom Miller describes how Xinjiang became a laboratory for China’s mass surveillance system – built with the help of US tech companies
Let there be light
The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding…
The lure of yellow pages
For almost as long as there have been books, there have been books about books — writers just love to…
Peckham wry
Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the…
Let yourself go
When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour…
The places that make us
In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was…
