Book Reviews

Even psychiatrists don’t know how the drugs they prescribe work

What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is wearyingly familiar to many of us — but to go properly mad, the sort of madness that involves delusions and police officers and locked psychiatric wards? Horatio Clare didn’t have to imagine what that was like for his book Heavy Light. It’s a memoir, subtitled ‘A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing’, and is an unsparing tale not just of what it was like for him to succumb to a psychotic episode but also of what it did to his family. The book starts with a skiing holiday in Italy with his partner Rebecca and the children. Already cracks are showing in Clare’s sanity: he is overworked, has been drinking heavily and smoking too much weed, and his family and friends are worried.

John Maier

Our need to get drunk in company may be innate

John Maier

Our need to get drunk in company may be innate

Sarah Ditum

The man who made Manhattan: The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, reviewed

Sarah Ditum

The man who made Manhattan: The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee, reviewed

Max Décharné

What’s a scribbled signature worth?

Max Décharné

What’s a scribbled signature worth?

Damian Thompson

Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

Hugh Thomson

The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting

Nicholas Shakespeare

The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe

Dea Birkett

As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?

Damian Thompson

Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

Hugh Thomson

The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting

Nicholas Shakespeare

The great awakening: Henry Shukman becomes a child of the universe

For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger than myself, had moved with his family to New Mexico. At his desk I managed to write three books, beneath shelves containing editions of his work. I can’t explain why it took me so long to reach up and open those books, but when I finally did, it was extraordinary to discover how similar were our trajectories: same prep school and university; two young sons; novels set in North Africa and Peru; a gap year working on an Argentine estancia.

Dea Birkett

As circus gets serious, is all the fun of the fair lost?

David Patrikarakos

The tragedy of Lebanon — from safe haven to bankruptcy

Roger Lewis

Terence’s stamp: The Art of Living, by Stephen Bayley, reviewed

David Patrikarakos

The tragedy of Lebanon — from safe haven to bankruptcy

Roger Lewis

Terence’s stamp: The Art of Living, by Stephen Bayley, reviewed

Madeleine Feeny

The young bride’s tale: China Room, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

Madeleine Feeny

The young bride’s tale: China Room, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed

The Book Club

Marie Le Conte: Honourable Misfits

28 min listen

The Book Club

Marie Le Conte: Honourable Misfits

28 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the political journalist Marie Le Conte, whose new book isHonourable Misfits: A Brief History of Britain's Weirdest, Unluckiest and Most Outrageous MPs. She introduces us to some of the dishonourable members of the past, and explains why - despite what we may think - in terms of our present day crop of MPs we may, actually, never have had it so good…

Philip Marsden

The life cycle of the limpet teaches universal truths

Philip Marsden

The life cycle of the limpet teaches universal truths

Adam Nicolson is one of our finest writers of non-fiction. He has range — from place and history to literature and ecology, from the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the poetics of Homer, from the archaeo-ethnography of his own Hebridean island to the hardy and threatened lives of seabirds. To each he brings a vigorous curiosity and intellect, coupled with an emotional receptivity that ruffles the surface of his prose. Now he has turned his attention to the foreshore of Scotland’s west coast, and a particular point on the northern edge of the Sound of Mull — near Rubha an t-Sasunnaich —with its weeds and its wracks and its shelled and glutinous sea-creatures. Building a series of berms, he creates rock pools.

Helen R. Brown

A matter of life or death: Should We Stay or Should We Go, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

James Hawes

Germany’s post-war recovery was no economic miracle

Helen Barrett

The man at the heart of punk: the late Pete Shelley recalls his Buzzcocks years

Mark Cocker

Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective

Caroline Crampton

She didn’t go quietly: Caroline Norton’s campaign for married women’s rights

Tom Miller

The US tech companies behind China’s mass surveillance

Boyd Tonkin

The power of the translator to break nations

Helen R. Brown

A matter of life or death: Should We Stay or Should We Go, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

James Hawes

Germany’s post-war recovery was no economic miracle

Helen Barrett

The man at the heart of punk: the late Pete Shelley recalls his Buzzcocks years

Mark Cocker

Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective

Caroline Crampton

She didn’t go quietly: Caroline Norton’s campaign for married women’s rights

Tom Miller

The US tech companies behind China’s mass surveillance

Boyd Tonkin

The power of the translator to break nations

The Book Club

Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal at 50

30 min listen

The Book Club

Frederick Forsyth: The Day of the Jackal at 50

30 min listen

My guest in this week’s book club podcast is Frederick Forsyth, whose classic thriller The Day of the Jackal has been in print for 50 years this summer. He tells me about banging it out in a few weeks on a typewriter with a bullet hole in it, the shady characters who informed his research - and how he never realised that, for much of its readers, The Jackal would be the hero…

Fleur Macdonald

Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed

Fleur Macdonald

Life’s a bitch: Animal, by Lisa Taddeo, reviewed

Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the sexual hang-ups of three ordinary women. It took eight years to research and write. It didn’t seem worth it. Luckily, she was also gathering material for a novel, Animal, a book teeming with the rage, frustration and drama so lacking in the debut. The same motifs and ideas —mothers, desire, shame — appear, but with a story that twists and turns. Animal is the first-person account of Joan, a slightly unhinged 37-year-old woman: ‘I am depraved. I hope you like me.’ She leaves New York after her former lover shoots himself in the face in a restaurant while she’s on a date with another man.