In the welter of Syrian bloodshed, why should we remember the death of a single man? Because he was the archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, tortured and beheaded by Isis two years ago when they destroyed the remains of Palmyra, one of the world’s most important ancient cities. Their victim was its director of antiquities. In an
This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time — not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson’s This Party’s Got to Stop. Patricia Lockwood is a poet — dubbed ‘The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas’ — who, after
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature is measured out in warbles and wingbeats — metaphors that have long since broken free of their originals, birds made not of sinew and bone but ‘ink and sentiment’. Richard Smyth’s A Sweet, Wild Note
This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story begins in 1663, jumps forward to modern times and then back to 1665. On all occasions, our attention is less on the actual house, Wychwood, than on the power of nature, whatever’s left of the
David Hepworth is such a clever writer — not just clever in the things he writes, but in the way he has conducted his career. A decade older than me, he too started out at the New Musical Express; but he went on to take Smash Hits to glory as editor, to launch Just Seventeen,
Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the bar at 25. After ten years of provincial practice he turned down the offer from Joseph Chamberlain of a safe Conservative seat, although politics was then the conventional highway to the bench (unlike now when
Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from
I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is what Francesca Segal achieves in The Awkward Age, published four years after her book, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. She takes six characters — widowed, middle-aged Julia, her teenage daughter Gwen, her grandparents-in-law
Jack Higgins’s writing routine was said to start with dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant in Jersey, followed by writing through the night until dawn, when he rounded off the working day with a glass of champagne and bacon and eggs. With his estimated lifetime sales of 250 million copies, his routine seemed to work.
Timbuktu. Can any other three syllables evoke such a thrill? For travellers, explorers and historians of Africa, the ancient desert city, one-time fabulously rich centre of the Saharan caravan trade and bookish haven for bibliophiles, is one of the great destinations — a place that manages to out-Mecca Mecca in its remote attraction. Leave aside
One afternoon in August 1978, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan were flying from Beijing to Shanghai. They were on the last leg of what was for both of them the first of many official visits to China. Soon they would be ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s first government, but at the time they were still in
For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking to discover Albatross, an unknown imprint from the English literary past. Before Albatross there was Tauchnitz, the Leipzig firm which for 100 years cornered the market in English language books outside the territories of the
War Horse, by way of book and play and film, has brought the role of horses in war into the public consciousness. Even before it, there was the erection of an Animals in War Memorial on Park Lane, paid for by an impressive list of aristocrats under the leadership of commoner Jilly Cooper. But what
Every nation has the right to control its borders, but we in the West are getting a bit too comfortable dehumanising other humans for failing to fill out forms in triplicate before fleeing the carpet-bombing of their cities. In recent months, Theresa May has rejected Calais’s child refugees; Donald Trump has seemingly tried (unsuccessfully, twice)
The human urge for personal hygiene has had many improbable side-effects, and I can confidently assert that through the ages, sponge-divers have punched consistently above their weight. Bronze-age tools, 10th-century Islamic glassware, a Byzantine ship whose plunge to the bottom was cushioned by the fourth-century Roman wreck it alighted upon, anchors, amphorae, sculpture: if it’s
In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just the beauties of the valley and the cool, pellucid waters of the Dal Lake which took their breath away. Living there was a legendary relic of an earlier age, who quickly became an object of
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He died from his injuries a month later. This book — Laurent Binet’s second novel — proposes that it was not an accident; that Barthes had just come from lunch with the Socialist candidate for the
In his mid-forties Will Ashon realised he was adrift and confused, confronted by the situation Dante described in the Divine Comedy: ‘In the middle of our life’s path/ I found myself in a dark forest.’ Ashon’s dark forest was metaphorical to begin with — conscious of ageing, dis-satisfied with his career in the music industry,
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion. Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the
She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of China, to a fishing village on the East China Sea, and to a furious, alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother sold at 12 into marriage for some pottage, and never given a name. Is that colourful