History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous stand against a vast Persian army at Thermopylae in 480 BC, or if Helen of Troy, originally from Sparta, had not been abducted, we might not remember them today. If their young men had not
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Proust my bank account would hardly grow by a single penny. Duty, guilt and pride never made the pages turn more swiftly, whatever a book’s length. Almost all vows to catch up on doorstopper
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration camps can be visited; tours operate around Chernobyl, Centralia — the city in America that is perpetually on fire — Aleppo and Fukushima. Tourists can ‘experience’ what it is like to live in a war
Most monuments are literally set in stone — or cast in bronze to better survive the weather. Being enduring, they arguably become ‘prisoners of history’, as this fascinating series of essays by Keith Lowe is titled. Conversely, perspectives are like the weather, constantly changing, as relationships between and within nations, and views on social and
It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering marriage set among the gathering shadows of Brexit. The Golden Rule is worth the wait. It opens with a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, the classic thriller in which two strangers, meeting
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so brings us to the edge of insanity? Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know and Sam Mills’s The Fragments of My Father explore both of these questions. Chung’s memoir takes on a sleuth-like quality as
Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating into biographies and memoirs as never before, scouring them for accounts of incarceration, illness, boredom, family meltdowns and sudden financial freefalls. One of the pleasures of the genre is the way in which the peaks
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a hand of poker in her life. She has read, re-read, dissected and annotated poker textbooks. She has scribbled notes while trying to keep up with her power-walking mentor, the poker legend Erik Seidel, as he
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one of the first books I ever reviewed, and I’ve kept tabs on his career ever since, in that spirit of comradely competitiveness one feels for a writer of a similar age launching at the same
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless simplicity but an undertow of melancholy that can be personal (bad love affairs, damaged families) or institutional (the death of old Hollywood, the birth of the new) or, best of all, both entwined. It is
In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life: Come all you brave boys, whose courage is bold, Will you venture with me, I’ll glut you with gold?Make haste unto Corona, a ship you will findThat’s called the Fancy, will pleasure your mind. In a week-long orgy of savagery, women flung themselves
Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until I read November 1918 it hadn’t to me. Now I know that between May and June that year, as German forces moved to within artillery range of Paris, a million of Ludendorff’s troops, half-starved owing
On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners died in a subterranean fire. Only no one is quite sure of the exact number because melted corpses are difficult to count. Nor is there any clarity on when the fire started or what caused
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not one of them. Mazur is out to muddy time’s waters, dismantling the easy opposition between clock time and mental time, between physics and philosophy, between science and feeling. That split made little sense even in
Formula One motor racing is the perennial, worldwide contest that most reliably gratifies hero-worshipping, power-worshipping, money-worshipping, technology-worshipping ghouls, and some others. The ghoulishness may be subconscious but it certainly seems to excite many spectators at every Grand Prix track, especially in foul weather, as drivers approach sharp turns flat out. If you heard of a
When Queen Alexandra chose her ladies in waiting she prudently surrounded herself with elderly and plainish ones, who did not tempt her susceptible husband Edward VII. ‘These are your wives?’ the Shah of Persia solicitously enquired. ‘They are old and ugly. Have them beheaded and take new and pretty ones.’ In earlier times, beheading was
A guide to reading in lockdown. My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first book I remember reading for myself was Hurrah for Little Noddy. As Enid Blyton aficionados will know, this is the second in the series about a self-absorbed wooden doll. It’s a thrilling tale about a
Matthew Kneale is much drawn to people of the past. In his award-winning English Passengers, he captured the sensibilities of a group of 19th-century seafarers bound for Tasmania in search of the Garden of Eden by chronicling their voyage in 21 singular, vibrant voices, and by weaving into their journey a heavy thread of racist
We live in an urban world. It’s a statistical fact. The great outdoors for most of us is a thing of the past — a place, like elderly relatives, to be visited infrequently and preferably with gloves. Metro world, by contrast, is safe, insulated, inviting. No getting wet in the rain, no patchy wifi, no
Publishers everywhere are looking for the new Sally Rooney, which is odd since as far as I know the old one is still around. As a result Ireland, which has never lacked literary talent, is giving us a lot of debut novels by young female writers this year. True, being the new Sally Rooney makes