More from Books
Apostle of modernism
Clive Bell is the perennial supporting character in the biographies of the Bloomsbury group. The husband of Vanessa Bell, brother-in-law…
Plunder from the palace
A book about the looted African art known as the Benin Bronzes begins by clarifying that most of them are…
Wolves in sheep’s clothing
The #MeToo movement isn’t all it seems. More than three years after countless sexual abuse allegations shook the world, the…
Communing with a great artist
Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed…
A worthy winner
To an observant outsider, the Soviets might have appeared to have developed an oddly intolerant attitude towards stray dogs. Every…
The great adventuress
At the masquerade celebrating the end of the War of Austrian Succession no one could take their eyes off the…
Everyday inspiration
‘One of the nicest things about being a writer,’ Shirley Jackson once noted in a lecture titled ‘How I Write’,…
The worst of times
Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest…
Wicked wit
The title alludes to Jonathan Meades’s first collection of criticism, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, and to the album by…
From beyond the grave
Give dead bones a voice and they speak volumes: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo was clamorous with the departed…
The time of our lives
Gay bar, how I miss you. Barely any lesbian joints have survived the online dating scene, and Grindr has replaced…
Constitutional rights and wrong
No one can accuse Linda Colley of shying away from big subjects. This one is as big as they come…
What it is to be English
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
Gardening frenzy
If you had asked me a year ago how a pandemic-panicked world of stockpiles, curfews and social isolation would influence…
The scholar and the gypsy
Naomi Ishiguro began writing Common Groundin the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The title refers to both Goshawk Common in…
The weekend cottage in the woods
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
The parent trap
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
Cat on hot bricks
The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real…
‘A second-class racism’
The comic David Baddiel has written a book which explains that much of the far left hates Jews. There are…
Black mischief
In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady…
The first industrial war
This book does not mess about. It tells the story of the fighting on the Western Front between 1914 and…
Five intrepid women
I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I…
From temples to labyrinths
At a certain point, the critic Robert Hughes once noted, at the heart of American cities churches began to be…
New-found freedom
In 2018 David Hockney went to Normandy to look at the Bayeux Tapestry, which he had not seen for more…
Man about the house
I have enjoyed many of Alan Warner’s previous novels, so it gives me no pleasure to report that his new…
