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Slavic adoration
If you want to see the very best of Gauguin and Matisse, go east. That was the case in 1914…
The mystique has gone
So upsetting it would have been, for those of us who rate Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers so highly, if…
A friend in need
What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read…
A fatal clash of civilisations
Many books claim to describe junctures that changed the world but few examine ones as consequential as Conquistadores: A New…
Figures in a landscape
Some of my happiest fiction-reading hours have been spent in the company of Kevin Barry: two short-story collections, both prize-winners,…
Satisfaction all round
In his latest book, the veteran pop commentator David Hepworth is concerned with satisfaction, its acquisition and maintenance. On record,…
The imitation game
Closely inspect No. 23 Leinster Terrace, Bayswater and you might notice the house has no letter box. Push at the…
Three Girl Fridays
From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political…
It wasn’t all laughs
Even if you didn’t have an Auntie Dot in Cockermouth (the one who ate a raffia drinks coaster, mistaking it…
Legion of Babel
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Irritable male syndrome
By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the…
Dublin pub crawl
Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s…
On a knife-edge with Stanley
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
Words take wing
When Helen Macdonald was a child, she had a way of calming herself during moments of stress: closing her eyes,…
Secrets of the double cross
Für dich, Tommy, ist der Krieg vorbei. However, many British servicemen, officers especially, didn’t want their war to be over.…
The mask of deception
Talbot Kydd, film producer; Anny Viklund, American actress; Elfrida Wing, novelist; these make the trio of the title. Private lives…
Breakdown in Berlin
‘I was what they call an “independent scholar”’, confides the narrator of Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill, a middle-aged writer from…
Blood and lust
In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The…
Between heaven and Charing Cross
After Stalingrad, Hitler desperately needed an encouraging novelty. Wernher von Braun, Germany’s leading rocketeer in the second world war, expertly…
Opposites attract
Babysitters are having a literary moment. Following Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age, Nick Hornby is the latest author…
Bloodbath in Rome
It’s not as if Julius Caesar wasn’t warned about the Ides of March. Somebody thrust a written prediction of the…
Formal, but fluid
When Romeo and Juliet first meet at a party, their words to one another fall into the form of a…
Other men’s wars
‘That was how that part of the world was at the time. Every bit of it belonged to Europeans, at…
A meditation on love
The scrawny little girl with ‘pipe-cleaner legs’ wants to feel at home with her parents. But father and mother live…
Worlds of their own
Holiday islands, desert islands, love islands, islands of eternal youth, siren islands, islands filled with screaming demons. Of all the…
