More from Books
Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed
A sequel to Hideous Kinky sees the two sisters Lucy and Bea, still close to their bohemian mother, trying (and failing) to negotiate life on their own terms as adults
Whatever happened to Caroline Lane? A Margate mystery
How could a feisty middle-aged woman suddenly vanish from the seaside town without trace? David Whitehouse set out to discover
There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep
Soon after Hitler came to power, a Jewish journalist, deprived of regular employment, began secretly recording her nightmares – and, as the terror increased, those of her fellow citizens
A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
An unlikely friendship develops between a taciturn local youth and a fast-talking American film-maker in a grim coastal town in postwar Britain
One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed
An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’
From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
The Theatre itself, and the works staged at England’s first purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch, all emerged from the guilds that formed the bedrock of the urban economy
Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed
A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting
Masculinity in crisis – portrayed by Michael Douglas
As the Manhattan attorney in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas epitomises the alarm many men felt for women’s new-found openness about sexuality
Could the giant panda be real?
Even in the past century the animal was considered so exotic that many doubted its very existence
Highs and lows: The Boys, by Leo Robson, reviewed
Mourning the loss of their parents, two brothers succumb to listlessness and lethargy in a sweltering London gripped by Olympic fever
Tim Franks goes in search of what it means to be Jewish
In a thought-provoking family history, the BBC journalist addresses questions of identity – and to what extent we are products of our forebears
Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press
Two former Izvestiya journalists describe how all but the bravest in the media have crumpled under pressure to toe the Putinist line
The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success
The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim
What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition
The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire
A life among movie stars can damage your health
So Dustin Hoffman tells the teenage Matthew Specktor as they share cigarette breaks at CAA, the Los Angeles talent agency they both frequent
Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine
At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline government service, and politics gets much of the blame as Vine looks back over the wreckage
What was millennial girl power really about?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘empowerment’ was a girl’s watchword. But she was empowered primarily to be pleasing to men and, above all, never grow up
The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history
Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law
The rose-tinted view of female friendship shatters
Are women’s relationships with each other today more brittle and less supportive than in the past?
Haunted by my great-grandfather’s second wife – by Alice Mah
An academic specialising in ecology, Mah traces her constant anxiety about the world to a ghostly Chinese forebear
The bloodstained origins of the Italian Renaissance
Prolonged warfare between city states was conducted largely by mercenaries, whose accrued fortunes translated into social status through patronage of the arts
North and South America have always been interdependent
It is impossible to fully understand one without the other, says Greg Grandin. Despite their numerous differences, their relationship is fundamentally symbiotic
The stigma still surrounding leprosy
Though long curable, the disease remains endemic in India, Mozambique and Brazil, with lack of medical funding leaving lepers among the world’s most marginalised people
