Wait until dark
A review of Nightwalking by Matthew Beaumont examines how London at night provided inspiration for some of our greatest classics
Love them or leave them
In the Family Way by Jane Robinson comprises over 100 heartbreaking personal accounts of illegitimacy in the 20th century
A brave man takes a stand
Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside, embedded herself for two years with the only effective police section on LA’s killing streets
Punch and Judy politics
Reading accounts of the New Labour years in Giles Radice’s Odd Couples is rather like touring an abattoir before the cleaners have been in
Cheep trickery
The ornithologist Mark Cocker is full of admiration for Nick Davies’s Cuckoo — as gripping as any detective story
The symbolism of slashed jeans
Jonathan Beckman takes pleasure in Tom McCarthy’s agile thinking, even if Satin Island’s hero is just a tongue-tied initial
Not Mister Jones!
My father was always arguing and falling out with people in the neighbourhood, but when he clashed with Mister Jones,…
An Indian family epic
Bright bazaars and dark family secrets are temptingly on offer in Aatish Taseer’s The Way Things Were,
Waterloo sunset years
Andy Miller finds Johnny Rogan’s biography scrupulously fair,though Ray Davies himself remains an enigma
A Stoic among sadists
A review of a biography of Seneca by Emily Wilson shows the Roman empire at its rotten best
Paradise lost
It’s all to do with sperm motility in Polly Samson’s The Kindness. You can see it coming, as the actress said to the bishop
Cold comfort farm in Canada
What prompted Patrick Gale’s great-grandfather to abandon his English family and up sticks suddenly to Canada? A Place Called Winter provides a convincing (fictional)answer
The stuff that binds us
A review of The Vitamin Complex by Catherine Price points out our basic ignorance about some of the body’s essential nutrients
Three men in the Basin
A review of Naturalists in Paradise by John Hemming describes how the naturalist Russell Wallace helped solve the problem of the origin of the species
Protestants preferred
Mary Kenny is shocked that the Irish Times, once champion of the British empire, now feels it has to apologise for any Irishman who fought in the Great War
Don’t Look Back
No, let’s not look at the old photographs any more: our hair was so full and shiny then, and anyway…
Artificial life
The cult series may have looked great but, as the final season draws to a close, was there really anything to it?
Nothing to write home about
Plus: The Cutting of the Cloth, a new play by Michael Hastings at the Southwark Playhouse that’s untouched by brilliance
American beauty
The cool, rich, melancholy paintings of this West Coast American hover seductively between realism and abstraction
Horror show
Slashings in the woods one minute, dancing pink forklifts the next - the film’s tone is all over the place
Naming and maiming
Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed makes for grim but gripping reading