Books
Disappointment all round
When I interviewed Paul Theroux 21 years ago at his home in Hawaii, there were already rumours that his ex-wife…
Knocking on Shakespeare’s door
I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…
A terrible beauty
Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but…
Ode to LA
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
A fully engaged life
From Bengali schoolboy to citizen of the world – Amartya Sen’s autobiography is a joy, says Philip Hensher
Australian art in the Roaring Twenties
The only criticism that can be levelled at For the Fallen by Paul Paffen is that it lacks the hard…
An imaginative interpretation of the past
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Where’s Leni?
Leni Riefenstahl was a film-maker of genius whose name is everlastingly associated with her film about the German chancellor, Triumph…
Broadmoor tales
True crime is having a moment: every day there’s a new documentary, book, podcast, or blockbuster film announced, detailing the…
Dishing the dirt
Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet…
So near and yet so strange
This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so…
City of dreams
I’ve never been to Barcelona, but Rupert Thomson makes it feel like an old friend. The hot, airless nights and…
Sublime strangeness
Whose were those feet in ancient time that walked upon England’s mountains green? That William Blake assumed his readers were…
Tortured genius
Andrew Motion describes the inner turmoil of the neglected poet Ivor Gurney
A load of oddballs
For reasons I can’t seem to remember, I have read an awful lot of cricketing histories. The dullest, by a…
The second-worst journey in the world
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure:…
Justice betrayed
It was always an inherently implausible accusation: that Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate had sexually assaulted choir boys after Mass…
A will and a way
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Murder and a moral truth
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Top notes
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
A light crack of the whip
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
Monster bunch
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
More him than her
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Still funny after all these years
A new biography of William Hogarth pays dutiful homage to his satirical genius but does not challenge its predecessors, writes Philip Hensher
Russia’s sacred tree
The image of the birch tree in popular Russian culture is as manifold as the trees themselves, but we could…
