More from Books
Down to the sea again
In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…
Revolt in paradise
Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should…
Between history and fable
Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…
Brave men in small boats
‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that…
Hiding in plain sight
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Thinker and gadfly
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
The problem of consciousness
Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…
The thinking dragon
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
The future is brown
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Chronicle of a death foretold
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
In deep water
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
More Russian escapism
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
Journey to selfhood
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Making scientific history
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
Musical misfits
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Foreign corners that are forever England
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Harping on the past
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
Half blind to the world
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
A very Irish tragedy
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
The price of courage
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
Riding the feedless horse
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dark days in Hollywood
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
