paranoia
The Russian spies hiding in plain sight
A programme of deep-cover espionage, begun in the 1920s, is as important to Russia as ever with the expulsion of so many diplomats in the wake of the war with Ukraine
Other worlds, other lives
A scientist finds a way to access other realities and bequeaths the secret to her daughter. But a dangerous adversary is on the trail
The devil comes calling
The sinister Sergeant Bertrand arrives in a ‘provincial, mediocre’ Russian town to wreak havoc in the lives of a couple mourning the loss of their son
Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…
All things lead to 9/11: An American Story, by Christopher Priest, reviewed
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s…
A decade of famine and purges: the murderous 1930s under Stalin
He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler.…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
The watchers and the watched: Patrick Flanery's I Am No One
‘First and last I was, and always would be, an American,’ Jeremy O’Keefe, the professor narrator of Patrick Flanery’s new…
What Tacitus would have made of the Heath rumours
The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the…
Skunk has changed me. But art has changed me, too
Two recent preoccupations have led me to the same reflection. The first is a Channel 4 programme on the effects…
Jeremy Clarke: I'm a fake. The cannabis tells me so
Can it be that the one single agreeable thing about getting old is that one loses one’s pot paranoia? No.…
