Book Reviews

In 1598, a certain Margaret Browne of Houndsditch gave a graphic description to the court of her neighbour Clement Underhill engaged in an adulterous act with her lover, as observed through a hole in the party wall. Some people have always been very interested in what the neighbours are up to; all of us can be affected by them. Emily Cockayne has investigated the relationship by conjuring up scores of pieces of evidence such as the one cited, from the early Middle Ages till the present day, trawled from manorial records, police and law courts, civic authorities and newspapers. The result is a nicely personal view of how we have

In June 1991 while working as a reporter in Rome, Ed Vulliamy received a phone call from his editor at the Guardian asking him to the travel to the neighbouring Balkan states to check out something strange that was happening in the region. Vulliamy spent the next few years immersed in the Bosnian War, the worst carnage to blight European soil since the Third Reich. In August 1992, Vulliamy revealed to the world the horrific concentration camps that were in operation in Omarska and Trnopolje in Bosnia. Vulliamy’s latest book The War is Dead, Long Live The War is a tribute to some of the survivors, who are now scattered

William Boyd is to write the next book in the James Bond franchise. The as yet untitled novel will be published next autumn. To mark the announcement, Daisy Dunn casts her mind back to a recent encounter with Boyd, where he spoke about the art of imagining and writing a thriller. It’s an ambitious eight minute walk from St. Hilda’s College to the Master’s Garden of Christ Church, where William Boyd is preparing to appear at the Oxford Literary Festival. He’s visibly bracing himself. It’s quite a walk from there to the stage – the kind of walk you’d make at a school prize-giving. A formal path for such an

Nigel Havers is in the hotseat this week. He tells us about his intimacy with the Racing Post and his dreams of playing Casanova. You can catch him tonight in Corrie. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Racing Post 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? The White Hotel – DM Thomas 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose? War & Peace – Leo Tolstoy, The Darling Buds

We all know the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, and Dachau. But what about Pechora, Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk?  Why are the camps to which Nazism’s victims were deported household words, while the Gulag archipelago – the far flung network of Soviet labour camps and penal colonies where the victims of Stalin and Communism suffered and died – remains terra incognito to most of us. Despite the vast disparity in the death toll – (Communist regimes killed, according to the respected ‘Black Book of Communism’ an estimated 100 million in the 20th century, ranging from the major monsters Lenin, Mao and Stalin to more minor Marxist killers such as Pol Pot,

‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’ And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .And still the pensive lands complain,And dead men wait as long ago,As if, much doubting, they would knowWhat they are ransomed from, beforeThey pass again their sheltering door. I stand amid them in the rain,While blusters vex the yew and vane;And on the road the weary wainPlods forward, laden heavily;And toilers with their aches are fainFor endless rest—though risen is he. Historically, most poems about Easter have been written by Christians. They are normally celebrations of faith. Thomas Hardy, however, was very self-consciously not a believer. But people’s need to understand the world in broadly religious