Give thanks for the tomb raiders
Without them, many of the artefacts now demanded back from museums simply wouldn’t have survived
Credit where it’s due to Tata, our greatest inward investor
Also in Any Other Business: the balance of payments; and a new job for Mossack Fonseca
Letting terror win
Can you believe that after the Brussels attacks the BBC took us on a tour of vulnerable London Tube stations?
Robocop returns
There are far fewer ‘elite’ armed officers than we think... but their methods are creeping into everyday policing
Trump’s women trouble
The message that the Republican frontrunner is anti-feminist is inflicting damage on him
How to save the monarchy
Charles is a serious, decent and admirable man. But he should renounce the throne in advance
White power
Dentists will tell you cheerfully – and accurately – how little over-the-counter products do. But they’re keen to get in on the business
Bought off by Brussels
Hundreds of millions are handed out to mega-charities, pressure groups, think tanks, multinationals, councils and NGOs
Chips with everything
This new law is a charter for busybodies and profiteers that won’t stop irresponsible owners and breeders
An incurable Romantic
Frances Wilson goes in pursuit of the ‘Pope of Opium’ — the first writer to make drug-taking seem dangerously exotic
The greatest anti-war poem of all
Will Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad — the first in English by a woman — prove the definitive one?
London’s burning
St Paul’s ablaze in 1666 makes a vivid backdrop to Andrew Taylor’s latest thrilling novel
A breath of fresh air
Ghislaine Kenyon celebrates the much-loved artist, whose work (says a fellow artist) feels like a gulp of fresh air
The iceberg cometh
Jenni Fagan’s latest dystopian novel — set in Scotland in 2020 — is enough to give one the shivers
Obscure object of desire
The desperate sexual compulsion at the heart of Garth Greenwell’s novel is as oppressive as its Soviet-style setting
Those fearless men, but few
In an effort to make things better, the founding fathers of the Irish Republic made things much, much worse, according to Ruth Dudley Edwards’s The Seven
Gay tittle-tattle
Gregory Woods’s Homintern opens with a bracing demolition of homophobia but rapidly descends into social tittle-tattle
Onwards and downwards
Matthew Desmond’s account of the relentless downward spiral of America’s dirt poor — and the greed of their ruthless evictors — makes for devastating reading
The holy sinner
With little to go on, says Nicola Barker, Michael Haag has cunningly constructed an imaginative, sympathetic portrait of the seductive ‘13th disciple’
Recent crime fiction
New crime fiction from Gillian Slovo, Chris Brookmyre, Helen Fitzgerald and Bill Beverley
The halo slips
Having regained her freedom, the Nobel peace prize-winner seems to have lost interest in human rights, according to Peter Popham
The rise and fall of Sicily
The British Museum’s new exhibition, Sicily: culture and conquest, celebrates the glories of this multi-ethnic, quadrilingual powerhouse
