Books
From the Odyssey to Njals Saga: a voyage round the great myths
Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo…
My agonising vigil over my twins’ fight for life
Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We…
Lusting after Bathsheba: Lux, by Elizabeth Cook, reviewed
The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or…
Toy theatres on the stage: the set designs of Maurice Sendak
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression…
Moon walks with the Romantic poets
Several years ago, I was interviewing the garden writer and designer Sarah Raven at her home in Sussex when a…
Gen Xers v. Millennials: White, by Bret Easton Ellis, reviewed
Q: What’s worse than listening to someone ranting hysterically about Donald Trump? A: Listening to Bret Easton Ellis ranting hysterically…
The London I loved: nostalgia for a dirty old town
All cities are shapeshifters, but London is special. London is a palimpsest of places gone but not lost. Even as…
Transforming Goosefish into Monkfish: branding’s slippery secrets
We live in a logic-obsessed world, from computer modelling of the economy to businesses run by spreadsheets. But we also…
My fictional Abimael Guzmàn turned out to be eerily accurate
Few Peruvians today are interested in ‘the Shining Path years’, which left no traces besides 70,000 mutilated bodies and a…
The desolate beauty of the Thames Estuary
We ought to cherish the haunted landscape of the Thames Estuary while we can. The grey hulks of old power…
Greece is the word for the New Yorker’s Comma Queen
Mary Norris’s book about her love affair with Greece and the Greek language starts with a terrific chapter about alphabets.…
Towards a technological utopia
The rebranding of John Browne has been a long and, to those of us living overseas, instructive affair. Readers will…
Passing bells for old Tokyo
In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after…
Oddballs of English philosophy
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…
Bach helped me survive Bergen-Belsen
One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the…
Last lines on Brexit from Geoffrey Hill
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition.…
Brutish Brits: You Will Be Safe Here, by Damian Barr, reviewed
Damian Barr explains the upsetting genesis of his impressive debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, in his acknowledgements: This…
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…
The stormy lives of Jack the Dripper and the Wife with the Knife
A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable…
Murder at Margate — and other crimes of passion
Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with…
