In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I
Christopher de Bellaigue, a journalist who has spent much of his working life in the Middle East, has grown tired of people throwing up their hands in horror at Isis, Erdogan and Islamic terror, and declaring that the region is backward and in need of a thorough western-style reformation. As he argues in this timely
On 5 February 1862, the night Abraham Lincoln and his wife gave a lavish reception in the White House, with the civil war swelling outside and their 11-year-old son Willie dying of typhoid fever upstairs, what was the state of the moon? Was it a ‘fat green crescent’? Or was it ‘yellow-red, as if reflecting
No disrespect to any of the present incumbents, but Karl Miller (1931–2014) was a literary editor in an age when such jobs mattered. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s he not only ran the books pages of two weekly magazines — The Spectator, and the Paul Johnson-era New Statesman — before moving on
‘Women,’ Captain Selwyn Jepson, SOE’s senior recruiting officer, once wrote, ‘have a far greater capacity for cool and lonely courage than men.’ This questionable assumption is not actually the reason why the women were recruited. That was down to their ability to move around enemy-occupied territory carrying messages, arms or heavy wireless sets without arousing
If a single book could help you to be kinder and more compassionate, could expand and deepen your understanding of other people (and possibly yourself) and make you less afraid of dying in the process, you would surely be eager to acquire it at once. Well look no further, for Grief Works is that book.
Nothing will come of nothing, said Lear, because he wasn’t familiar with quantum physics. According to our current best theories, a region of space that contains nothing at all is still seething with pairs of virtual particles popping in and out of existence for no good reason. Meanwhile, it is possible to be mathematically sure
In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a
The history of an army is essentially the history of its deeds. The history of an army within an army is more intriguing. The Praetorian Guard, a modern term, was founded, or rather formalised, around 27 BC by Augustus for the protection of the emperor and his family. Hitherto, cohors praetoria had been a generic
The greatest of Bach’s 224 cantatas is BWV 109, ‘Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben’. Its subject — the title translates as Mark 9:24, ‘I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief’ — is that strange cognitive dissonance of believing something yet not believing it at the same time. Daniel Dennett’s new book, From Bacteria
Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, The Sympathisers, the stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are set largely among the Vietnamese diaspora on the west coast of America, where Nguyen himself lives, having fled to the US from Vietnam with his family in 1975. They mostly feature characters juggling the lives they’ve made in
On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint
Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, once claimed that he could always tell Scottish fiction from English. Novels, he said, reveal fundamental differences in the values of the Scots and the English. I wonder then what he would make of Annalena McAfee’s book, Hame — about the most Scottish work of fiction that any
Rogues’ Gallery describes itself as a history of art and its dealers, and Philip Hook, who has worked at the top of Sotheby’s for decades, is well versed in his subject. Sadly for the prurient, this is not an exposé of the excesses of the market from one of its high priests; and Hook says
This book kept reminding me of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. Just as his character spied on customers’ private lives while developing their pictures, so Chris Paling gets to know the readers at the library where he works. Unlike Williams he doesn’t follow them home at the end of the day (in fact some
As a child, I used to travel with my mother from London to Cannes, a journey that took slightly under 24 hours. The strangest part of the trip was the three or four hours in Paris, where the train trundled between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon along the Petite Ceinture, giving
We’re told not to judge books by their covers, but faced with these two it’s hard not to. Harman’s is one of those thick, expensive tomes which, understandably, politicians write when they’ve had enough earache and, unbelievably, publishers keep buying for vast sums, despite the fact that a fortnight after publication you can pick them
When A.A. Gill died last December, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth across the nation. I must admit this came as a surprise to me, but then I hadn’t read him for many years, having developed a ferocious dislike for the Sunday Times too long ago now to remember quite why. My memories of
John Burnside is the author of an impressive bookshelf of elegant novels and slim, precise volumes of poetry, and like all prolific writers he has certain repeated themes. Nicely, repetition is one of his themes. He writes of the tricks of memory, and the impossibility of perfectly recalling the past. He writes of absent fathers,
At the start of this novella the protagonist, Thibaut, is ambushed by Wehrmacht soldiers between the ninth and tenth arrondissements. That the year in 1950 is not the strangest aspect, as he is rescued by the appearance of the Vélo, a bicycle-like contraption with a queasily organic prow. It is, in fact, a living version