Murder

Fifty years ago, the blasted bodies of three unmarried siblings, members of the Luxton family, were discovered at a Devon dairy farm, set in a lush stretch between the ‘lavender haze’ of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The youngest member of the family, Alan, was 55. He lay in his pyjamas and work boots on the cobbles in the farmyard. Robbie, 65, with cuts to his face, and Frances, 68, clad in a nightgown rucked up to her waist, were found together in the garden. All the doors to the primitive thatched family farmhouse were locked from inside. The ‘tragic trio’, as they were described by the tabloid press, were the last

On 18 November 1910, 300 women marched on the Houses of Parliament to demand the right to vote. Their protest was met with shameless brutality: punches, kicks, beatings and sexual assault from policemen and male bystanders. Three weeks earlier, a young woman named Ethel Le Neve had been tried for her part in the most sensational crime of the new century, the ‘London Cellar Murder’. The portrait of Le Neve presented by her barrister had been one of ‘perfect Edwardian feminine innocence’, docile, gentle, lacking in agency – a reassuring contrast to the strident, determined suffragettes, whose refusal to conform to societal expectations were to culminate in the attacks at

The 16th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Suleyman liked to impose himself on foreign monarchs from the start, always beginning official letters with the uncompromising assertion: ‘I am the great lord and conqueror of the whole world.’ In this sparkling account of his middle years, the second in an ambitious three-volume biography, Christopher de Bellaigue never actually describes Suleyman as ‘the magnificent’, his most widely known epithet. But he certainly conjures up his awesome presence at home and abroad in animated prose saturated with vivid colour and detail. So, in 1538, we encounter the sultan in his mid-forties, a swan-necked figure in a white lozenge-shaped turban, riding to war in the Balkans.

Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’ As a whizzily futuristic sounding instrumental ode to a transatlantic communications satellite, and only the second British recording to top the American Billboard charts, its charm for Thatcher was perhaps as much political as musical. That it was the work of an independent producer might also have appealed to her love of freewheeling, self-reliant private enterprise. Roger George ‘Joe’ Meek

I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits was enough to make my younger brother bury his head in a cushion. Graves had spiced up Suetonius’s racy accounts of violent murder, incest and poison. But, in the world before trigger-warnings, the BBC outdid him in bloodlust. The most gruesome scene in the TV drama – of Caligula doing some amateur surgery on his

Susan Barker’s Old Soul opens with pages from a diary: ‘T’ records a late-night conversation with a woman known as ‘E’ as they watch Venus rise. While they talk, we learn that Venus ‘spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man’, so one day is longer than a year. E imagines she is there, walking towards a sun that never sets. When T says that sounds lonely, E is adamant it wouldn’t be. This strange fragment sets the tone for a sinister horror story in which one woman – who goes by many names but is often simply ‘the woman’ – has an unnaturally prolonged life, serving an entity

For Anna, wickedness istypified by the villain ofa fairy tale –Rumpelstiltskin The narrator of Alive in the Merciful Country is a woman weighed down by past trauma ‘like a bag full of broken kaleidoscopes’. Anna is a teacher steering her nine-year-old pupils through the 2020 lockdown while coping with life as the single mother of a troubled teenage boy, trying to rebuild trust after a shattering betrayal: ‘I didn’t ask to be in a spy scenario, or an action scenario, or a political thriller, but I recurringly have been.’ Damaged by life, she has learned to question misuse of power, personal and political: quis custodiet ipsos custodes indeed. Fans of

This is a novel that spans the Truss administration, from its heady dawn to its decline and fall 49 days later. The Proof of My Innocence starts as a satire, not so much of Truss and her world but the ideologists who thought that the prime minister’s brief, shining moment was their long-cherished future. They meet in a collapsing Cotswolds castle to hear from delegates such as Josephine Winshaw, who intones that everything now is woke: ‘Paying your TV licence was woke. Getting vaccinated was woke… buying avocados was woke, and reading novels was woke.’ Another speaker praises a reactionary novelist to a much smaller audience. Into this milieu steps

The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived ‘one of those fabulous existences which survive… to astonish posterity’. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in

‘You never seem to get a good murder nowadays.’ With this ‘fretful complaint’ George Orwell imagined newspaper readers bemoaning the decline of the classic English murder. Gone were the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ – a solicitor or dentist killing his wife in a quiet suburban home – which made the perfect News of the World spread to curl up with after Sunday lunch. In their place was an altogether more brutish type of murder committed by ruthless serial killers. Everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of 10 Rillington Place Orwell was writing in 1946. Seven years later, one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal

Even before the 872-day long siege ended, both survivors and onlookers had already begun to refer to Leningrad – formerly and currently known as St Petersburg – as a city of heroes. Tales of bravery and self-sacrifice were enshrined in memorials, histories and memoirs, which between 1945 and 1991 were published in the Soviet Union at an average rate of one per day. But heroism is, of course, only a partial description of life within the starving city where theft, murder, betrayal and a million smaller acts of self-interest were just as prevalent as acts of valour. The idea that Leningrad was a city of heroes was in part a

The year is 1993 and 16-year-old Tommo has been moved from a day state school of 2,000 pupils in brown blazers that ‘when it rained… smelled of shit’ to Eskmount, an elite Scottish boarding school, where boys wear kilts and put their ‘cocks on your shoulder’ when you’re working in the library (easier in a kilt) and routinely hang ‘smaller kids in duvets… out the window’. The horseshoe effect in schooling terms: the more expensive, the more savage. Hugo Rifkind’s Rabbits opens with a bang: ‘When the shotgun went off under Johnnie Burchill’s brother’s chin, word had it, the top of his head came off like the top of a

‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks… estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly

Jaroslav Rudis’s latest novel follows the 99-year-old Wenzel Winterberg, a Sudetenland German, and his middle-aged Czech carer, Jan Kraus, on what is a quirky European take on the buddy road-trip story. Marx claimed that ‘men make their own history’, but do so under the burden of the past, with the weight of dead generations upon them. The tragedy soon to become a farce begins, according to Winterberg, at the site of the Battle of Königgrätz, with the old man proclaiming: ‘The Battle of Königgrätz runs through my heart.’ He then rambles on about its ‘half a million ghosts’, their roles and where they lie now, before blaming the battle for

It takes a Scandinavian mother to write like this: ‘Why murder a nine-year-old girl? She wasn’t raped. Rape is the only motive I know of for the murder of little girls, unless the killer is a close relative.’ Linda Segtnan’s The Eighth House benefits from this bluntness. Its author, a historical researcher based in Stockholm, was browsing through a newspaper archive in 2018 when a photograph of nine-year-old Birgitta Sivander caught her attention. The girl lived in a village called Perstorp in southern Sweden until one evening in May 1948 she went out to the football field and did not return. A search was organised, the human chain making its