More from Books
The secret seven
Madeleine Slade, born in 1892, was a typical upper-class Victorian daughter of empire: a childhood riding around her grand-father’s estate…
Into the woods
The extent of Walt Disney’s grasp of the natural world remains unclear. After the Austrian author Felix Salten sold the…
Neither free nor easy
The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his…
One who didn’t get away
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his…
Keys to the future
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One…
Cooking up a storm
What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers.…
Confused lives
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
All human life is here
When is a life worth telling? The Soviet writer Konstantin Paustovsky’s six-volume autobiography The Story of a Life combines high…
The new immortals
In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk…
Magical mystery tour
At a village train station in deepest Kent two men and their pet mongoose are setting off on their honeymoon.…
An abiding evil
The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore…
Man of honour
On 8 April 1864 an Austrian archduke with a penchant for daydreaming agreed to be emperor of Mexico. As Edward…
Dirty secrets
Claire Keegan’s tiny, cataclysmic novel takes us into the heart of small-town Ireland a few decades ago, creating a world…
The coming of barbarism
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his…
Reading and self-reflection
‘Male writers now are the opposition party, and that may not be such a bad thing for them.’ So Rob…
Freedom or death
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of Greek independence in March 1821. It has…
The ghosts of academe
It could be said that the power of a horror story depends on the possibility, however minute, of it being…
A late awakening
Tessa Hadley is the queen of the portentous evening, the pregnant light and the carefully composed life unwittingly waiting to…
Variations on a theme
My daunting brief: to tell you about Hanya Yanagihara and her new, uncategorisable 720-page novel in 550 words. It’s the…
The trees are on the move
Covering 20 per cent of the Earth’s surface, the boreal forest is the largest living system, or ‘biome’, on land.…
Her own master
‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’…
Girls, girls, girls
Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…
Nyet to Dr No
Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…
Tuber fever
Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…
