I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for
How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it. Ernest Coleman’s story of his search
Until fairly recently, all over the western world there were specialised eating places catering largely for Jews who respected the kashrut dietary laws. From family caffs to white tablecloth establishment, these called themselves ‘dairy restaurants’. They were nearly, but not quite, vegetarian, since they allowed (the kosher-defined) fish with fins and scales. This wondrously weird,
‘Beauty is pain,’ the model Gigi Hadid asserts. She’s one of the successful, rich people quizzed by William Leith in The Trick: Why Some People Can Make Money and Other People Can’t. We all know a few of the tricks of getting rich. You start by avoiding noble, important professions that benefit everyone but pay
Michael Arditti has never held back from difficult or unfashionable subjects. His dozen novels, including the prize-winning Easter, as well as Jubilate, The Breath of Night and Of Men and Angels, explore faith in an increasingly secular modern world. Half a century ago he would have brushed shoulders with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but
Geography can be history and history geography — and sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked. Laurence C. Smith’s Rivers of Power endeavours to make us see beneath the surfaces of arterial waters and consider them as carriers of civilisation and arbiters of destinies. Rivers are elemental and ambivalent. They are frontiers and highways, destroyers
‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t realise is that smokers often smoke to be alone. As Mass Observation had reported a decade earlier: In an increasingly gregarious world, where fewer and fewer habits and pastimes are entirely individual, the cigarette remains
I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crimefiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologise, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh- inducing novel. Writers such as the late
In 1926, while putting in place the repressive laws and decrees that would define his dictatorship, Mussolini appointed a new chief of police. Arturo Bocchini was 36, a lawyer and former prefect of Brescia, a cynical, vengeful, witty and corpulent Neapolitan. Under his 17-year tenure, fascist Italy became one of the most sinister and efficient
We often hear that science fiction — or ‘speculative’ fiction, as the buffs prefer — can draw premonitory outlines of the shape of things to come. Well, consider the case of this novel by an acclaimed Argentinian-born, Berlin-based writer, first published in Spanish last year. Little Eyes imagines a gadget (nothing fancy really, just a
