In 1791, Isaac D’Israeli — father of prime minister Benjamin — published his most famous work, the Curiosities of Literature, a collection of freewheeling mini-essays on whatever literary topics happened to tickle their author’s fancy: ‘Titles of Books’, ‘Noblemen Turned Critics’, ‘On the Custom of Saluting after Sneezing’, ‘Cicero’s Puns’. One of its joys is
In Haiti you have to be careful which founding father you admire. The average Haitian will think first of Toussaint Louverture when talking about their island’s revolt against France in the late 18th century, and about the original idea of a full-fledged Black republic: Toussaint the stable, the intense, the military genius, courageous, careful. But
The English cannot be understood without some appreciation of their attachment to their games, and yet this is an area of their story often overlooked by historians. Or perhaps it is simply considered beneath their interest. This is the central message of Robert Colls’s superb account of England viewed through the medium of its sports
To look upon a freshly painted wall is to behold a smooth surface; to look at it through a magnifier is to see a rough and irregular landscape — but turn the magnification up sufficiently and see it become regular again, a geometric matrix of atoms held in molecular bonds. Keep magnifying and you enter
In the face of authoritarian rule, what is a citizen to do? Some will join the oppressors, while others, such as the diarist of the Nazi era Victor Klemperer, will keep their heads down, hoping the horrors will pass (they usually do not). Some, generally a tiny minority, choose the path of civil courage and
The cosiest way to read The End of Everything, Katie Mack’s fast-paced book about universal death, is as a murder mystery. Everything in spacetime, including the reader’s understanding of much of the story, is in the shadows. Black holes, quarks and gluons, Cepheid variables, the Concordance Model? Mere words, strewn across the floor. Believability, restraint
Such a sublime, terrible beauty, the shark. Glidingly filled with our awe, as if those glassy eyes marked us out as a bite-sized snack from the start. Evolutionarily pre-lapsarian — they’ve been around for 450 million years — sharks are wreathed in a symbolic cruelty, theirs and ours. In one of the most vivid scenes
Smell is the oldest sense. We owe our existence to it. The moment you start to talk about smell, things explode in a shimmering, chaotic starburst of epistemological and ontological complication. It is involuntary; we have no noselids. Smell stays switched on in our sleep: to inspire is to smell. It has a bigger ratio
A month ago the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine each retracted a major study on Covid-19 drug therapies. One article had been up for more than a month, the other for less than two weeks. Both were based on faked data. That the rush to publish on Covid-19 led established researchers, reviewers
On a family holiday almost 40 years ago I visited Winsford, the village on the edge of Exmoor where Ernest Bevin was born (and Boris Johnson was raised). Having read the first book in Alan Bullock’s scholarly three-volume biography, I’d become a convinced Bevinite (not to be confused with the followers of Nye Bevan, his
One of the most striking, and lowering, aspects of lockdown has been the deprivation of human exchange, and especially conversation. We can talk to our immediate families but not properly to a wider range of humanity. The Zoom chat, with so many ordinary conversational features removed, is not the same thing at all. Conversation is
The world described in this book is weird enough anyway, but reading about it during lockdown is positively surreal. It’s about VIP nightclubs, mainly in New York, but also in Miami, Cannes, St Tropez or wherever rich people congregate. Ashley Mears is a professor of sociology, as she likes to remind us with references to
The Spartans were not the only Greeks to die at Thermopylae. On the fateful final morning of the battle, when Leonidas, knowing that the pass had been sold, ordered the vast majority of the contingents stationed at the Hot Gates to retreat and live to fight another day, two detachments stayed behind to join the
Until the age of ten I lived in a street of mock-Georgian houses called Dickens Drive. Copperfield Way and Pickwick Close were just around the corner. Even now I regularly pass the Pickwick Guest House on the main road out of Oxford. None of this is especially surprising. Go online and you can buy a
Augustine had it that ‘no one is free from sin, not even an infant’. Machiavelli deemed that humans are ‘ungrateful, fickle hypocrites’, and even the founding father John Adams, the paragon of American democracy, was sure that all men would be tyrants if they could. Thucydides, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud — all were
The crisis inflicted by Covid-19 has been a source of anguish for everyone; yet we frequently hear how people are rediscovering solace in nature, especially in their gardens or in the surging renewal of life in the spring. According to Tim Burt and Des Thompson, the editors of a collection of essays about the importance
We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research off your own bat it meant a
The subjugation of nature has formed a cornerstone of the human agenda. How surprising and humbling, then, to find our way of life so rapidly and unexpectedly undermined by a biological force that transcends identity and culture. Still worse, when we discover that the source of this chaos is a sub-microscopic viral particle whose genetic
In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or
In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of
