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Robin Hood v. the toffs

The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’ traditions, reluctant to surrender the old ways of sourcing food from nature’. Imagine a book about two men who were being celebrated for ‘continuing their ancestors’ tradition of beating their wives, raping them when necessary,

A watershed moment in music history

In 1994 I was working in marketing at London Records, a frothy pop label part-owned by the Polygram Group — both long gone, swallowed up by Warner Bros. That summer some Americans came into our office to pitch us a project. Rather than unfurling some band or singer, they wanted to talk about technology, specifically

The traffic in human misery

When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she travels to Delhi to uncover the circumstances of his death. On the surface, Invisible Threads is a novel about an English woman on a personal journey to India, and comes with many of the trappings

Bogs and fogs

In his poem ‘Eden Rock’, Charles Causley conjures up a dreamy memory of a childhood picnic ‘somewhere beyond Eden Rock’. He reported later: ‘Somebody asked me the other day where Eden Rock is —I mean I have no idea, I made it up! “Dartmoor,” I said — that’s always a safe answer.’ As southern England’s

Celebrations of song and humanity

‘All my life, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.’ Ask any musician for a one-sentence summary of Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and they will probably tell you that he is Hungary’s national composer — a musical modernist who passionately championed his nation’s folk music

The bravest of the brave

‘It is the task of a Patton or a Napoleon to persuade soldiers that bits of ribbon are intrinsically valuable. The historian’s job, in part, is to spot contradictions and unravel obfuscations, and the history of the VC is steeped in both.’ To this job of de-obfuscating, Gary Mead, former journalist and military historian, might

To Hell in a handcart — again

Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the

Beautiful, bedevilled island

The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo, Arab rule was generally tolerant, its dolce far niente evocative of sultans, minarets, concubines and other jasmine-scented delights. Walking round Palermo today, however, one is assailed by less lovely smells. Parts of the city remain

Lulzfags v. moralfags

It is almost a century since the Michelin brothers had the brainwave of supplementing their motorists’ guide with information about fine-dining establishments. Their star-rating system had become a mainstay of lifestyle reviews long before the Internet came along. In the digital age, this work has been comprehensively crowd-sourced: the immense success of review sites such

Dizzying swirls of impasto

With a career of more than 60 years so far, Frank Auerbach is undoubtedly one of the big beasts of the British art world. His personal reticence, however, and the condensed, impacted idiom of his painting have contributed to his enigmatic, somewhat opaque reputation. Catherine Lampert, who has sat regularly and patiently for him since

Host

In eastern Congo years ago on a road logged into a hill I drove or was driven one evening to see pygmies who claimed they were being eaten. This was possible. I’d met a woman with my name who’d watched the fire on which her arm was cooked and then devoured. The pygmies turned out

Something sensational to read on the train

Readers who have put in some time on the railways may remember the neat, brush-painted graffiti that appeared in 1974 on a wall facing the line just outside Paddington station: FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE. Not until Banksy took up his spraycan did a piece of London graffiti make such

A triumphant failure

I must be an idiot for pointing out the failings of a novel that’s so screamingly, self-denouncingly about failure. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand is a nutty, occasionally hilarious, flaccid carrier bag of a comic romp, all dazzling one-liners and no comic paydirt. Like his debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole (about a misfit philosopher and

Lost in the telling

This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key fact I can provide without giving away the plot is that Caroline, the film-making wife of Michael, the novel’s main protagonist, is killed in the badlands of Pakistan by a drone controlled from a facility

There’s no substitute for human intelligence

Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot over the years, and continues to do so. During the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, the main preoccupation of our intelligence agencies has not been with classic espionage by the Soviet Union,

Romance of the old kitchen garden

Considerable areas of our memory are taken up with food: it might be the taste of Mother’s sponge, the melting texture of an aunt’s buttery pastry or something recent, like the flavour of the first spoonful of a sour and nutty south-east Asian dish. Especially good meals are recalled with the same clarity as revolting

The strangest objects we know of

The idea of black holes sounds so quintessentially modern and 20th-century that it may come as a surprise to learn that it originated over 200 years ago; John Michell, a natural philosopher and clergyman, used Newtonian physics to conceive of a star massive enough to prevent even light from escaping its gravitational pull. Marcia Bartusiak’s

A 50-year infatuation

The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions to painting is René Magritte — whose best work David Sylvester rather rashly claimed induces ‘the sort of awe felt in the presence of an eclipse’. Julian Barnes discusses what he calls the artist’s doctrine

Funny things happen on the way to the Scillies

It’s a real skill, writing about a journey where nothing ever happens. We shouldn’t be surprised that Simon Armitage is so good at it: he’s a poet, and therefore used to reporting on nothing happening, or rather spotting the little things that are always happening but the rest of us are too busy to notice.