Double thinking, double lives
Jan Morris finds Tim Parks’s A Literary Tour of Italy a portrait of a nation — one rich in double lives and double thinking
Between duty and desire
In Coup de Foudre, the title novella of Ken Kalfus’s collection of stories, the ex-head of the IMF sends an email apologia to the chambermaid
Running out of time
In Two Hours Ed Caesar tracks the footsteps of the remarkably athletic Kalenjin tribe
Bringing Camus to book
The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud revisits Camus’ masterpiece and provides a bitter commentary on the ongoing Franco-Algerian relationship
An American Wodehouse
In Wake Up, Sir!, Jonathan Ames captures the Wodehouse idiom to perfection — and sets it on a strange new path
The glory that was Greece
In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece Josiah Ober finds that, for all their sophistication, the Ancient Greeks were useless economists
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
The song of the sirens
Sophia Kingshill’s complex cultural history includes sirens, selkies and some freakshow mermaid lookalikes
Between Heaven and ‘L’
Jonathan Aitken finds his guide to the Bible a noble endeavour and full of passion, despite a maddening mythical interlocutor
Master of vitriol
Potter’s hardboiled, sarcastic wit was heroic — but beneath it lay a nostalgic yearning for an imaginary Eden, as revealed in The Art of Invective: Selected Non-fiction, 1953–94
When the journey, not the arrival, mattered
The Trains Now Departed by Michael Williams and Three Men and a Bradshaw by John George Freeman both recall a not-so-distant past when travelling in Britain was a positive pleasure
‘Shocking is too easy’
Jasper Rees talks to the cult filmmaker, artist and Pope of trash about political correctness, post-ops and pubes
The beat goes on
Where would Fleetwood Mac be without Mick, or Steely Dan without Keith Carlock - or The Beatles without Ringo?
Shaw hand
Plus: wit and energy aplenty in Robert Carsen's Falstaff at the Royal Opera House - but where are the tears and pathos?
Chorus of disapproval
The kind of film that appears never to have watched any other films, or it wouldn't have bothered
Curiouser and curiouser
Plus: Martin Gayford takes a closer look at the Zen canvases of Agnes Martin at Tate Modern and experiences a moment of revelation
Home and away
Plus: why I spent the whole of the Globe's Measure for Measure wishing the fun would stop
Première league
The highlights include major new compositions by James MacMillan, Michael Finnissy and Luca Francesconi and a very anti-ivory-tower number from Eric Whitacre
Behind the Black Flag curtain
Channel 4's latest episode of Dispatches, Escape from Isis, which includes secret footage inside the terror state, is TV at its most unmissable, says James Delingpole
