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Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
Temples of delight
There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…
‘A really complicated person’
Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her…
Isolating with the ex
Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…
Cries and whispers
Place and story are little remembered now. The rectory in Essex was severely damaged by fire in 1939. But any…
Recherché reading
Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous…
A deadly vacuum
Now is a difficult time to empathise with Russians – which is why we need Maxim Osipov. We need him…
The road less travelled
How best to write a book about the Himalayas when Mount Everest has been reduced to just another tick-off on…
The fate of castaways
Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by…
Dangerous myth-makers
Racism lies at the heart of the Victorian rewrite of the creation myth. What happened in prehistory, according to Thomas…
Our private terrors
Every summer, during our holiday in Orkney, there is a moment of panic. We’re standing on a dizzying cliff –…
The Middle East maelstrom
For 25 years, Abed Takkoush assisted foreign reporters like Jeremy Bowen when they arrived to cover the chaos and conflicts…
Loved and lost
Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the…
The roots of German militarism
It is the contention of Peter Wilson, professor of the history of war at Oxford University and the author of…
Man of many parts
William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the…
A complicated bond
When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising…
The ultimate gamble
This is an important and topical book. Mary Sarotte traces the difficult course of Russia’s relations with Europe and the…
An empire crumbles
Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this…
‘He couldn’t help being a bit surreal’
Love him or loathe him, Lucian Freud was a maverick genius whose life from the off was as singular as…
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
Only one half of the story
As introductions go, ‘My name is Agnès, but that is not important’ does not have quite the same confidence as…
Happiness is a warm gun
‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of…
For the chop
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Perhat Tursun’s unnamed protagonist is an outcast. A young Uighur in an increasingly Han city (Urumchi,…
Back on the road again
Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you…
Who’s pursuing a vendetta?
Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…
