More from Books
The strain of keeping mum
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love…
Sad and beautiful
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work…
A great public servant
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane…
Deeply disturbing
Sorry For Your Trouble (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song.…
Sweetness and light
Who would imagine that Johann Zoffany’s celebrated 1780 depiction of the extensive Sharp family happily making music on their pleasure…
All change
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
Fowl indignity
It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in…
Dark secrets
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
Only human after all
Ludwig von Beethoven belongs among those men whom not only Vienna and Germany, but Europe and our entire age revere.…
How to while away the winter
Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a…
What’s the world coming to?
It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my…
The psychedelic scene
There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in…
Progress is painful
One of my long-held beliefs is that evolutionary biology should be taught extensively in schools. There may be some objections…
How are the mighty fallen
Greg Woolf didn’t know his book would come out during an urban crisis. Thanks to coronavirus, Venice’s population, for example,…
Swirling meditations on language
There is a particular sub-genre of books which are witty and erudite, comic and serious and often of a bibliophilic…
Escape into fantasy
The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie…
The good, the bad and the ugly
Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they…
Criss cross
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering…
Empires strike back
From ancient times, empires have risen and fallen, driven by war, territorial acquisition, trade, plunder, religion, ideology, technology, culture and…
Small miracles
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…
Ghoulish entertainment
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
Fair women and brave men
History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Time immemorial
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not…
Trapped in hell
On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners…
