If you read the first volume of John Romer’s A History of Egypt, which traces events along the Nile from prehistory to the pyramid age, you will understand why he thinks Egyptology is not a science. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to be exact about anything when most of your knowledge is based on deduction
In backgammon, a blot is a single checker, sitting alone and unprotected. This is a sly title for this sly novel (which was published in the US as the more literal A Gambler’s Anatomy). The hero, Alexander Bruno, is a single, exposed man, and a professional backgammon player. He also suffers from an eye condition:
Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in
According to the author of this beautifully illustrated, hugely engaging book, if we were ever to choose a fellow mammal to serve as symbol for our time, then the polar bear would probably make any shortlist. Standing ten feet tall on their hind legs and weighing as much as a ton, the males are the
Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid for tawdry, over-simplified stunts? Howard Bloch is a professor at Yale whose previous books have had medieval French literature, the Bayeux tapestry and medieval misogyny as their subject matter. He has taken an entertaining diversion
The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has only lately become known to Anglophone audiences, through the masterly translations of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet. Work written and published in the 1980s, during the corrupt and cynical last days of so-called ‘goulash communism’ under János Kádár, began to circulate in English in the early 2000s. In Sátántangó,
The recent spate of rock memoirs has proved one of the less rewarding sub- genres in the post-digital Gutenberg galaxy. Obeying few rules of a good read, they usually suggest a variant on Frank Zappa’s biting assessment of rock journalists: ‘People who can’t write, ghosting for people who can’t talk, targeting people who can’t read.’
‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.’ Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, is an academic picaresque. This
At first glance, Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River seems like an application for a National Book Award. Its protagonist, Robert, a 70-year-old history professor, lives in comfortable ennui with his semiotician wife, Darla: tenure, sabbaticals, staring through separate study windows in their sprawling Florida home. It’s a life of carefully brewed coffee and uninterrupted research.
The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the passing of the Victorian age, we have been treated to a never-ending stream of books about the monarch herself, the houses her subjects lived in, the railways they built and travelled on, their sexual peccadillos,
During the second world war, while one brother was editing Punch as a national institution (‘Working with him was a little like helping to edit the Journal of Hellenic Studies,’ said a colleague), and another brother, given to asking questions like ‘Which way does a clock go round?’, was breaking codes at Bletchley (as an
It is a chastening thought that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities now include MI6. Alan Judd’s latest novel is particularly interesting about the relationship between our intelligence services on the one hand and our politicians (and their special advisers) on the other. Deep Blue is the fourth of his spy novels to have Charles Thoroughgood as its
This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our
What to make of this unexpectedly startling novel? Though you may be lured into a false sense of familiarity by mentions in the blurb of Trollopes J and A, and the comfortable middle-class settings (Sussex, Notting Hill), it turns out to be a diatribe against male selfishness, a meditation on approaching death, and an apologia
This month, 30 years ago, I wrote a draft of what was to become soon afterwards the first comprehensive human rights charter for people with HIV. It was born out of an urgency to stop the global drift by governments to panic and repression. In March 1987, a handful of us founded the UK Aids
Who is the least likely candidate for an animated princess movie? That’s the question former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath asked his colleagues over lunch a few years back. Over the hour they kept one-upping each other with increasingly inappropriate heroines. Nabokov’s Lolita came out on top. Throughout the conversation, Porath kept throwing out the names
During David Cameron’s years as prime minister, an unobtrusive figure could be seen slipping out of the back entrance to Downing Street. At the end of each day, Julian Glover, then Cameron’s chief speechwriter, made his way across St James’s Park to the Institution of Civil Engineers, a Palladian palace off Parliament Square. There, burrowing
I have been researching and writing about black British history for over 30 years but never before have I been fortunate enough to review a 600-page book on the subject, published to accompany a recent major BBC documentary. The book and the four-part series give some indication of the extent of a history which David
Set in rural England in 1911, Tim Pears’s latest novel tells of a friendship between 12-year-old Leo, a precocious carter, and Lottie, the daughter of the master of the farm on which he and his father work. The Horseman is the first instalment of what will be a trilogy, and it is perhaps for this
‘John, we need your autobiography.’ ‘I thought I’d express my life experience in song.’ ‘That’ll be fine.’ This would be an odd agreement, and one the world would (rightly) be less than thankful for. But though not everyone plays music, we all have a relationship with prose. And recent years have seen a trend in