This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping. Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was
‘Fucking men,’ spits a woman towards the end of John Niven’s brilliant tenth novel, The Fathers. ‘Why do they always think it’s about fixing everything?’ It’s a classic hit of deadpan humour from a novelist best known for sending up the most appalling blood, spunk’n’booze-spattered excesses of modern men. A former A&R man with a
‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’ Reduced to ‘slaves’ who ‘tremble before the Englishman’s whip’, the Indians
When Portuguese traders sailed past a verdant, mountainous land on the fringe of the Chinese empire in the mid-16th century, they named it Ihla Formosa – ‘beautiful island’. But Kangxi, the third emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was less impressed when his naval forces captured it in 1683, scoffing: ‘Taiwan is no bigger than
One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who
In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such
Joad Raymond Wren’s ambitious history of early modern European news, capacious in structure, monumental in volume, is named for a witticism by John Earle (c.1601-65). The author of Microcosmography, a compilation of satirical ‘characters’ whose obvious modern heir is Victoria Mather’s ‘Social Stereotypes’, was arguably the funniest member of mid-17th century England’s most likeable clique,
How do you dispose of 48 uniform volumes of the collected works of Lenin and Stalin? Pirkko Saisio and her mother hatch a plan. The books are ‘dumped into the trash bin’ by their apartment block, then coated with ‘a week’s worth of eggshells and fish guts and newspapers’. No one will find them, Mother
This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics. Erskine teases out narrative strands through a
In Whiskerology, Sarah Gold McBride combs through a bristling, tangled mess of data, facts and theories about gender, race, national identity and their relationship to – yep, you guessed – hair. Do not buy this book if you are looking for a fun read about vintage updos, goatees and ponytails; Ye Olde Horrible Haircuts it
There are 32 years between the publication of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and his Men in Love – a gap roughly equivalent to that between Sgt. Pepper and ‘Windowlicker’ by Aphex Twin. Perhaps three cultural generations. It is disturbing, therefore, to find Welsh still pumping out further sequels to his spectacular literary debut. But whereas that
After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of ‘the planet’s 30 most exciting young people’, alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States. In Moderation,
Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great
Time was when historical fiction conjured images of ruff collars and doublets, with characters saying ‘Prithee Sir’ a lot. Nowadays, the range of featured period settings has expanded unrecognisably, though a new favourite has emerged – the second world war, where Nazis stand in for nefarious noblemen. The Darkest Winter by Carlo Lucarelli, translated by
It’s 1796, and an idealistic young English doctor, Duval Harlington, just released from La Force prison in revolutionary Paris, learns that his father is dead. He is now Lord Harlington, heir to a fortune and the idyllic estate of Muchmore. But in order to gain possession of his heritage – and, as importantly, foil the
In the autumn of 1938, within nine weeks of each other, two boys arrived in New York, fleeing the gathering storm: a 15-year-old Jewish German and a ten-year-old Catholic from Poland. Both would repay the mortal debt they owed by dedicating their lives to the Land of the Free. The older boy was, of course,
‘Paris, like many old cities, is saturated with blood.’ The food writer Chris Newens certainly knows how to draw the reader in. A Londoner who has lived in Paris for the past ten years, he sets out to eat his way through all the arrondissements, starting with the 20th and spiralling backwards through the coil
We think of PTSD as something that happens to war veterans, but the Conservative politician Theo Clarke’s harrowing account of birth trauma proves otherwise. Her perspective is unique. When the former MP for Stafford was in the last weeks of her pregnancy, the government was in shambles. Boris Johnson was about to resign, to be
Old Kiln is a novel spoken by the muse of memory but carved into shape by the fear of forgetting. Jia Pingwa (b.1952) wrote the first draft in 2009 after visiting his home village. Remembering a prolonged bloody conflict that tore the village apart during the Cultural Revolution, he was disturbed to find all traces
How to describe the Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s stories? Sci-fi scenarios, vignettes, thought experiments, fables, parables? They do not have plots so much as premises from which consequences, extrapolations and ironic complications stem. Unfortunately, the joy of these pieces makes them resistant to reviewing. You have to tell not show their ingenuity. For example, the
