Books
‘A Slow Passion’, by Ruth Brooks – review
Snails are supposed to hate eggshells. Not the ones in Ruth Brooks’s garden. They clamber over the barrier as though it’s ‘a new extreme sport’. Ditto hair. And grit. She… Read more
long back yard
This must be how we die, a Sunday train, late afternoon, November, Basingstoke. This must be how the heart falls out of reach where it won’t be warmed, too many… Read more
West’s World: The Extraordinary Life of Dame Rececca West, by Lorna Gibb — review
Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured… Read more
A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki — review
About halfway through A Tale for the Time Being I had the uncomfortable feeling that this was going to be a reincarnation story and that I would soon discover one… Read more
search party
the worst night coming the bloody dark covers our traces fanning across the grid worked out in the Ops Room section by section any place my heart is gone any… Read more
To Save Everything, Click Here, by Evgeny Morozov — review
Technology may not have taken over the world, but it is making quite good progress in taking over our lives. Thirty years ago, receiving a phone call was the height… Read more
Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review
Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something… Read more
The Real Great Escape, by Simon Read — review
The scene is chilling. Four men stand in the snow, all in uniform. The men are in pairs, one in each pair holds a pistol to the head of the… Read more
The Undelivered Mardle: A Memoir of Belief, Doubt and Delight, by John Rogers — review
This ‘wry soliloquy’, as Ronald Blythe calls The Undelivered Mardle in his introduction, is quite unlike anything else, although its ostensible subject, the history of a small Suffolk farmyard church… Read more
The Quickening, by Julie Myerson — review
The plot of The Quickening (Arrow/ Hammer, £9.99) by Julie Myerson (pictured) revolves around pregnant, newlywed Rachel and her sinister husband, Dan. Rachel’s ghostly journey begins when Dan suggests a… Read more
Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, by Eric Hobsbawm - review
Like many posthumous books from distinguished thinkers, this isn’t one. A book, I mean. Not really. The problem is that nobody seems to buy cobbled-together collections of previously published essays,… Read more
Confronting the Classics, by Mary Beard - review
The Emperor Augustus, ruler of the known world, once spotted a man in the street who looked a bit like himself. ‘Did your mother ever work at the palace?’ he… Read more
The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian - review
‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they… Read more
Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, by David Schalkwyk - review
The so-called ‘Robben Island Bible’ is one of the holy relics of Shakespeare criticism. It is a copy of a 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, kept by a political… Read more
Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig - review
Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to… Read more
The Dance of the Seagull, by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli - review
In the first six pages of Andrea Camilleri’s new novel, Inspector Montalbano drinks at least four cups of coffee and watches a seagull dance to its death in front of… Read more
Mr Speaker: The Office and the Individuals since 1945, by Matthew Laban - review
The sheer workload. That’s the first big surprise in Matthew Laban’s absorbing history of the Speakership since 1945. Typically, the Speaker rises at dawn and holds several hours of preparatory… Read more
Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey - review
We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer… Read more
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