Books
Desperate mothers, abandoned babies: the tragic story of London’s foundlings
One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses…
How poetry turned a failing comprehensive into one of Oxford’s most oversubscribed schools
Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well…
Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…
Would Turkey exist as a nation if it hadn’t annihilated its Christians?
Turkey greets you with a chilly blue eye, a flared eyebrow, a cliff-like cheekbone. The face of the republic’s founder…
Should adoptive parents be allowed to pick and choose their child?
The sorrow of involuntary childlessness is profound. The award-winning novelist Patrick Flanery and his husband knew this pain. Their craving…
Satirising the global society: Only Americans Burn in Hell, by Jarett Kobek, reviewed
An immortal faery queen from a magical gynocratic island arrives in Los Angeles to track down her missing daughter. This…
Has Shakespeare become the mascot of Brexit Britain?
The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation,…
It’s ugliness, not beauty, that spurs us to action
Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s…
The serious games of the Oulipians
Have you heard of the Oulipo? The long-running Parisian workshop for experimental writing? Even if you haven’t, you might have…
Cracking jokes with Dr Johnson
I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of…
Would Faber & Faber still exist without T.S. Eliot?
Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The…
An outsider inside: We, The Survivors, by Tash Aw, reviewed
It’s not immediately obvious who the survivors in Tash Aw’s formidable new novel are, or who the narrator even is,…
A remote island tribe in Indonesia makes whaling seem positively noble
Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of the Book of…
Is British food really still wodges of stodge?
‘You are what you eat.’ The old phrase always reminds me of Denzil, John Sparkes’s character in the comedy sketch…
God save us from Søren Kierkegaard
Surely God, if He existed, would find a major source of entertainment down the ages in the activities of theologians,…
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be profiled by Janet Malcolm?
God, I wish I was Janet Malcolm. Fifty or more years as a staff writer on the New Yorker, reviews…
A new version of Saladin — as silver-tongued diplomat
I can only remember one page of any of the dozens of Ladybird histories that I read avidly as a…
Will the Pilgrims’ Way soon rival the Camino de Santiago?
There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had…
Vasily Grossman: eye-witness to the 20th century’s worst atrocities
Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (completed in 1960) has been hailed as a 20th-century War and Peace. It has…
A computer will never write the Brandenburg Concertos
What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert…
The invisible man behind Hollywood’s greatest films
What do the following filmmakers have in common: Victor Fleming, John Ford, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch,…
Murder in the basement: The Language of Birds, by Jill Dawson, reviewed
Jill Dawson has a taste for murder. One of her earlier novels, the Orange shortlisted Fred and Edie, fictionalised the…
The Struggle and The Scream: is Karl Ove Knausgaard Munch’s doppelgänger?
Norway doesn’t have a world-class philosopher (Kierkegaard was Danish). Karl Ove Knausgaard declared at the end of his previous book…
Was there no end to John Buchan’s talents?
John Buchan was a novelist, historian, poet, biographer and journalist (assistant editor of The Spectator indeed); a barrister and publisher;…
Time for a Tippett revival
Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English…
