This is a treasure house of a book, filled with curiosities and evidence of a rare breadth of patient investigation. Anyone who has read one of Graham Robb’s books, from his early biographies of classic French writers, through a wonderfully amusing study of 19th-century homosexuals, to a series of historical and geographical studies of France
My first love was a penguin. Pengwee was an adorable brown and white emperor chick who had my heart and broke it the day he dived into the bath. After a week in the airing cupboard he smelled of fish – surprising in a soft toy. But then penguins are surprising. Towards the end of
Israel would not have been born when it was – 1948 – without Hitler’s genocidal war on European Jewry. Dispossessed Jews had to be provided with a home. In the rush to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, safeguarding Arab nationalism was not the most pressing concern. Israel’s foundation thus marked a turning point in
No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward
World Cup fever is a strange affliction. It’s more contagious and unavoidable than Covid, and more widespread too: each new World Cup, as Simon Kuper writes, ‘becomes the biggest media event in history’, which ‘occupies the thoughts of billions of people’. It also produces a cluster of sometimes contradictory symptoms, physical as well as mental.
Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) made his name as a film theorist. His critical writings have long been available in English, and now his fiction is finally getting its due. The first of his two novels – published in Germany in 1928, five years before Kracauer fled the rise of Nazism – uses as its title his
Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly
