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Theft by stealth
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
The world held its breath
Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in…
Family feeling
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Mission to Mars
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
The great image-maker
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
A tendency to intolerance
Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give…
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
Eliminate the positive
Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…
As time goes by
There were many moments in Early Morning Riser that made me laugh out loud in recognition. An episode where the…
Problems of communication
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
A necessary evil
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
Prepare for take-off
Come Fly the World is not the book I thought I was getting. The slightly (surely deliberately) pulpy cover —…
Lost for words
Jon McGregor has an extraordinary ability to articulate the unspoken through ethereal prose that observes ordinary lives from above without…
Putting on a brave face
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Puzzle pieces
This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I…
Trailing clouds of glory
So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s,…
A sting in the tail
Jonathan Sumption has developed ‘many strange habits over the years’, he tells us disarmingly, and one of these is to…
Well-trodden ways
Hidden away in the Old City of Jerusalem is a tattoo parlour which has been serving pilgrims for the past…
On the track of a great fiddle
An extraordinary omission from Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects is the lyre, the instrument closest…
Quite contrary
This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so…
A daughter’s duty
There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the…
Rage on the page
As a budding political apparatchik, my first job out of university was as a junior parliamentary assistant to Alan Duncan…
Encircling gloom
When the unnamed narrator of Sarah Bernstein’s The Coming Bad Days leaves the man with whom she has been living…
In Aslan’s country
Philip Womack 1 May 2021 9:00 am
C. S. Lewis’s enchanting Chronicles of Narniaseries has, in recent years, come under critical fire. It’s racist, sexist, colonialist; blatant…