Book Reviews

The deployment of Shakespeare to describe Brexit is by now a cliché. It might take the form of a quotation, be borrowed in a headline, or involve the name of one of the better-known characters; it might turn up in that most hollow of adjectives, Shakespearean. It has two possible modes. There is triumphalism drawn from the history plays: this sceptred isle, once more unto the breach. And there is tragic calamity: the betrayal by Brutus, Hamlet dithering. Nobody much invokes the comedies, perhaps because negotiations with the EU have not yet descended to cross-dressing. Shakespeare is our national myth, most useful in a time of crisis, and an amazingly

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by the journalist and (as one half of the crime writer Nicci French) novelist Nicci Gerrard to talk about her new book What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. The loss of her own father to dementia prompted Nicci to look at one of the most painful and pressing social problems of the age: how we care for, or fail to care for, those who have dementia — and the philosophical questions of what it means when the things that make you start to fall away. 

You may not have heard of John Boyne, but you’ll almost certainly have come across his most famous book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. A children’s novel about two boys meeting through the barbed wire of Auschwitz, the book was met with heavy criticism for its historical inaccuracies – none of which stopped it selling a staggering five million copies worldwide and being turned into a Hollywood film. But this week Boyne has been floored by a far tougher foe than a few grumbling historians: he’s incurred the wrath of the gender police. Boyne’s new book, My Brother’s Name is Jessica, is about a teenage boy who comes out

Say what you like about the efficiency of the Kindle, one day we’re going to wake up and miss the lizards. Among the many lost methods of making an illuminated book in the pioneering days of Renaissance printing, the way we once obtained powdered gold may be the most lamented: ‘In a pot place nine lizards in the milk, put on the cover, and bury it in damp earth. Make sure the lizards have air so they do not die.’ By the seventh day, ‘the lizards will have eaten the brass… and their strong poison will have compelled the brass to turn to gold.’ The design consultant John Boardley quotes