Schizophrenia is the psychiatric illness about which the most misconceptions abound. It’s not so much the ‘negative’ symptoms that cause misunderstanding, devastating as they are — social withdrawal, self-neglect, flattening of mood — but the auditory hallucinations and delusions, often of a paranoid nature, that can accompany it. Nathan Filer, a psychiatric nurse, wrote the
One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is that no one writes novels like Love in a Cold Climate and The Dud Avocado any more. I’m talking about the brand of romantic misadventure written with such wit, verve and emotional honesty that you
Western attitudes to piracy have dripped with hubris. In his classic history of 1932, Philip Gosse confidently argued that European empires and technological superiority had ‘done away’ with pirates entirely. He and others regretted the sacrifice of these noble savages to the march of progress. Nostalgia imbued pirates with a romantic aura as happy-go-lucky rebels,
K.S. Komireddi sets out to establish his secular credentials before he sets up his primary argument: which is that India’s secularism is in danger. In the prologue, we are introduced to the author as a young man who briefly attended a madrassah, where he made a Muslim friend, and the two celebrated the Hindu festival
Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round to claim that the animal has spontaneously combusted. Brian has his doubts, not least because Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog. But he nevertheless uses the incident as inspiration for a poem, ‘The Day
Susannah Stapleton’s erudite but hugely entertaining debut is a true-life detective story about the quest for a true-life detective. A longstanding fan of Golden Age crime fiction, Stapleton is reading a 1930s Gladys Mitchell novel featuring the sleuth Mrs Bradley when she has a sudden thought: were there any non-fictional female sleuths around at the
In 2002 I flew to New York to interview the dance music producer whose 1999 release Play remains the bestselling electronica album of all time. A few years earlier, Moby had been known as a teetotal Christian vegan, an ascetic anomaly in a scene built on hedonism, so there was something comic about his new-found
I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about the poet and verse dramatist Gordon Bottomley. I can’t remember now which of his plays it concerns, but it must have been just after the notorious MP and swindler Horatio Bottomley had been imprisoned for
As rousing death-and-glory speeches go, it is one of the best. With a besieging Roman army only hours from storming the mountain stronghold of Masada, where 967 Jews were making their last stand in around AD 73, the rebel leader Eleazar Ben-Yair gathered the men together and called for a mass suicide. He told them:
Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th century. Her book The Viceroy’s Daughters, an account of the three daughters of Lord Curzon, marked her transition from debutante-itis to something grittier. It was followed by a biography of Diana Mosley, published a few
What is it about Naomi Wolf that inspires such venom? Perhaps that she’s American, brash, media-savvy and not averse to showing off her impressive embonpoint, which might go down badly in academe. But also — she makes mistakes. She made a pretty bad mistake in her very first book, The Beauty Myth, published in l990,
Meet Deen Datta, a nervous, practical and cautious man, born and brought up in Calcutta, who now lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a dealer in rare books. Recently and unceremoniously ditched by a woman with whom he had been in a once promising relationship, and with his sixties ‘looming in the not-too-distant-future’, he
For Joanna Pocock, a midlife crisis is the moment in which ‘bored of the rhythm of our days, whatever those may be… we begin to realise that we have more past than future’. With the approach of her 50th birthday and the onset of the menopause, she is struck powerfully by this notion. Her response
Six remarkable stories shape this book. Tracing the trajectories of the Odyssey to the Icelandic Njals Saga, via the Kosovo Cycle of heroic poems, the French Chanson de Roland, the German Nibelunglied and our own home-grown epic Beowulf, Nicholas Jubber’s new work is at once a travel journal, a meditation on the idea — and
When James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential appeared in 1990, it introduced us to a world of blatant corruption, casual racism and routine police brutality that, a year before anybody ever heard of Rodney King, might have seemed fanciful to some. Set in the early 1950s, the novel was a landmark in neo-noir writing, in which historical
The novel is a wonderfully commodious creature. One might wish they made trousers like it, for it can stretch or shrink to accommodate almost anything, from Ali Smith’s Spring (part story, part polemic) to Max Porter’s prose-poem/fable, Lanny. Then there’s the current vogue for re-tellings: Margaret Atwood’s version of The Tempest and Pat Barker’s feminist
Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We are all produced in variations of anxiety, pain and delight: what is the point of labouring labour? Two years ago, the novelist Francesca Segal gave birth to twins ten weeks prematurely. Her account of their
‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version of this saying, referring to the dangerous waters more than 40º south of the equator. In Wild Sea, Joy McCann focuses on these waters with a history of the Southern Ocean. The ocean surrounds Antarctica,
‘I am very, very pleased,’ murmured Queen Victoria in 1895, when she dubbed Henry Irving, Britain’s first theatrical knight. He and Ellen Terry, who so often played opposite him, were international celebrities. Bram Stoker was their intimate friend and associate. He managed Irving’s Lyceum Theatre for 27 years and spent much of his career in
It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this is the case with Tom Lehrer’s deliciously satirical tribute, ‘Alma’. Reading Alma Mahler’s obituary in 1964 — the ‘juiciest, spiciest, raciest’ he’d ever come across — Lehrer was amazed by her matrimonial CV and proceeded