More from Books
Grief fills the room up
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
A family in a billion
Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts.…
An unexamined life
Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his…
Flying too close to the sun
The beautiful Greek island of Hydra became home to a bohemian community of expats in the 1960s, including the Canadian…
The shape of things to come
To begin not at the beginning but at the end of the beginning. Or rather, to begin at another beginning,…
Fame is a fickle food
Good writing about celebrity is scant. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate…
A battleground for archaeologists
Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…
Creepy men everywhere
‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah,a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines…
Born to be wild
Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite…
Trying not to get killed
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…
The bittersweet lure of the past
At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop…
An idyllic vision of the future
The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the…
Be not so fearful
Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend…
Where the soul sits alone
If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…
Strategies for survival
Late in his life, I asked my uncle René about his exploits in wartime France. What I knew was that…
Mad, bad and dangerous
Brian De Palma brings his film director’s eye to Are Snakes Necessary? (Hard Case, £16.99), written in collaboration with the…
Straight to number one
Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve…
The show that bombed
‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then…
An age-old problem
‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…
Descent into lawlessness
It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since…
James Bond and Q in one
Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…
Things that go bump in the night
This is a paranormal book — by which I mean it exists in a truly out of the ordinary netherworld…
Mysteries multiply
Steampunk, a shapeshifting and unpredictable genre, has a way of subverting the past, mischievously disordering the universe with historical what-ifs.…
A woman of no importance
‘Buy pink baby clothes,’Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this bestselling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s surgery. Jiyoung’s…
Plumbing the depths
Two years ago, the counter-extremist analyst Julia Ebner decided she needed to delve deeper into the extremists trying to disrupt…
