Books
Tobias Jones finds in Italian football hooliganism a mirror image of Italy itself
Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s…
20th-century assassins – How to be a Dictator reviewed
Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini,…
What made Lucian Freud so irresistible to women?
By his early twenties, Lucian Freud was already putting Casanova in the shade, as Craig Raine reveals
Was there some Freudian symbolism in Lucian’s botanical paintings?
In early paintings such as ‘Man with a Thistle’ (1946), ‘Still-life with Green Lemon’ (1946) and ‘Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot’…
How Britain conned the US into entering the war
In June 1940, MI6’s new man, Bill Stephenson, ‘a figure of restless energy… wedged into the shell of a more…
Crazy nannies and missing children: the latest crime fiction reviewed
Madeline Stevens’s debut thriller, Devotion (Faber, £12.99), might more appropriately have been titled ‘Desire’. It’s a riff on that old…
The elegance and humour of Neville Cardus
As a fully paid-up, old-school cricket tragic, I astound myself that I have read almost no Neville Cardus. How can…
In praise of Thomas Graham, unsung hero of the Peninsular War
Why does a man join the army? The answer was probably more obvious in the 18th century than now, but…
It takes a former drug dealer to explain the global narcotics scene
In the early 2000s, Yekaterinburg was in the grip of a major heroin problem. For Yevgeny Roizman, ‘Russia’s vigilante king’,…
The Dambusters raid was great theatre — but almost entirely pointless
The great bomber pilot Guy Gibson had a black labrador with a racist name. This shouldn’t matter, except Gibson loved…
Carry on up the Zambezi
I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who…
Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?
As Christianity became more organised and hierarchical, it grew increasingly hostile to both mysticism and empirical science, says Jonathan Sumption
When Decca records were part of everyday life
In 1929 in America, Dashiell Hammett published his debut hardboiled novel Red Harvest, over in Paris Buñuel and Dalí began…
Taking pride in household chores really can ease depression
There are many books about what it’s like to live with mental illness and the aftermath of child sexual abuse.…
Something in the air: Broken Ghost, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
Broken Ghost begins in the aftermath of a rave on the shores of a mountain lake above Aberystwyth, with three…
Sympathy for literature’s least heroic characters
Whether we see the primary cause as being postmodernism (for decades we’ve been told that our master narratives no longer…
When the Grand Design met ‘le Grand Non’: Britain in the early 1960s
Peter Hennessy is a national treasure. He is driven by a romantic, almost sensual, fascination with British history, culture, and…
If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret
Ian Thomson pays tribute to Maigret’s creator on the 30th anniversary of his death
Novel explosives of the Cold War
Humour, satire, drama and poetry proved explosive weapons in the fight against Stalinism, says Nicholas Shakespeare
We should all share the blame for the Rohingya tragedy
My local shop in Yangon was owned by a retired army officer and his wife and guarded by their handsome…
From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy
This is a gentle, lovely book. It will, I’m sure, appeal to many an aspiring cook and baker, and should…
A single man of no fortune must be in want of a job: younger sons in Jane Austen’s England
Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure…
Spicing up local history —with a giant, a dragon and an ancient yew
How interesting is local history? The history of my Cotswold village — recently celebrating the centenary of the Armistice with…
The treasures to be found mudlarking by the Thames
The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore.…
Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?
There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles…
