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…
Levitating basketball players: investigating the psychic in sport
Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books,…
Where were you when you read John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’?
Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If…
Cometh the hour: Boris Johnson may be the Tories’ best hope
The worse things are for the Tories, the better for Boris Johnson. If the Tories were ahead in the polls,…
Meet the real Alexander Nix. An interview with the notorious former head of Cambridge Analytica
If you have heard of Alexander Nix, you probably think he’s a villain. He is the former head of Cambridge…
Writers blocked: Even fantasy fiction is now offensive
It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival…
Snog a Tory: Why you should learn to step outside your comfort zone
Ew! Are you squeamish? Are you grossed out by meat, by fish, by eggs, by scales and suckers and shells…
What one activist’s death tells us about war crimes in Syria
In the 1990s film The Usual Suspects, the detective character explains how to spot a murderer. You arrest three men…
The truth about air quality? It’s the best (and cleanest) in living memory
We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health…
How do Britain’s pubs get their names?
An easy one: what links Jack Straw’s Castle, The Labouring Boys and The Jolly Taxpayer? No, not the parliamentary expenses…
From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald
East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark…
The duo that broke the mould of poster design
The best double acts — Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert & George, Rodgers and Hart — are often made up of…
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s #MeToo Medusa is a bad hair day from Hades
Medusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and…
The mosque where it’s the men who make the tea
On returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one…
Willy Loman would have been fine if he’d worked in a laundry: Death of a Salesman reviewed
Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to…
Anderszewski went at Beethoven’s Diabellis with a nail gun
Are Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations really ‘the greatest of all piano works’, as Alfred Brendel claims? It’s hardly what you would…
A clunky exercise in box-ticking: Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years reviewed
These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’…
A Saturday-night variety show: Take That at the O2 reviewed
Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take…
