Diary
I love Suffolk, not just for its beauty but for the stories to be found all around me. Every day…
Prima donna
Giorgia Meloni is favourite to be Italy’s next prime minister. What does she really believe?
The danger of Dylanomics
The problem with attempts to make everything in life more scientific is that reality hates generalisation. You can try to…
Village villainy
Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like…
The Russian Proust
Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…
Nasty, brutish and short
As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…
Hand luggage
The general flying advice this year, with airports resembling cattle markets and when you can’t be sure if you’re ever…
Missing in action
Someone in the Guardian wrote that Boris Johnson had his ‘out of office’ on, and the Chancellor was ‘missing in…
The comfort of strangers
For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes,…
The best of the bunch
It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…
A sentimental journey
Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…
Perturbed spirit
Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The…
The French scapegoat
On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…
The dangers of vegetarianism
I do not doubt that hot weather occasioned by climate change is the primary cause of the many wildfires we…
Adrift in Berlin
Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…
A shaggy drug story
The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…
Seize the moment
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…
At least we still have wine
Even in recent heat, the English summer can be magical. As long as there is shade, a pool and a…
The Russian enigma
Nothing is certain in a country where the past is constantly rewritten, says Owen Matthews
What art will represent us?
It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the…
Suing child gender clinics may be harder in Australia
It would probably be illegal for Victorian families to do what their British counterparts are doing, and sue LGBTQ+ child gender…
