Books
The tragedy of a life not lived: Slanting Towards the Sea, by Lidija Hilje reviewed
The story of a doomed love affair in turn-of-the-millennium Croatia aches from the start. But more haunting still are the missed opportunities that result from it
Oh come all ye faithful
Catholics make up the largest Christian denomination in Australia. The Catholic Church runs thousands of schools, hospitals, aged care facilities…
A double loss: The Möbius Strip, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
Lacey writes in the aftermath of two break-ups – one romantic, one religious – in a hybrid work that even she has difficulty defining
Have the Gallaghers suffered from ‘naked classism’?
Their biographer thinks so. But if 1980s Britain had been less class-ridden, the brilliant Noel might have been drawn to further education, got a ‘good’ job and been lost to music forever
The importance of bread as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance
Two authors writing in response to the war use baking as a prism through which to view the country’s heritage and its defiance of Putin
Collateral damage: Vulture, by Phoebe Green, reviewed
Sarah Byrne is covering her first war, reporting from Gaza. But her pursuit of a scoop triggers a series of events that may haunt her forever
Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed
A sequel to Hideous Kinky sees the two sisters Lucy and Bea, still close to their bohemian mother, trying (and failing) to negotiate life on their own terms as adults
Whatever happened to Caroline Lane? A Margate mystery
How could a feisty middle-aged woman suddenly vanish from the seaside town without trace? David Whitehouse set out to discover
There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep
Soon after Hitler came to power, a Jewish journalist, deprived of regular employment, began secretly recording her nightmares – and, as the terror increased, those of her fellow citizens
A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
An unlikely friendship develops between a taciturn local youth and a fast-talking American film-maker in a grim coastal town in postwar Britain
One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed
An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’
From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
The Theatre itself, and the works staged at England’s first purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch, all emerged from the guilds that formed the bedrock of the urban economy
Charles I at his absolutist worst
The months preceding the outbreak of civil war saw distrust of the King become widespread and a ‘new temper’ take hold
Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed
A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting
Masculinity in crisis – portrayed by Michael Douglas
As the Manhattan attorney in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas epitomises the alarm many men felt for women’s new-found openness about sexuality
Could the giant panda be real?
Even in the past century the animal was considered so exotic that many doubted its very existence
Highs and lows: The Boys, by Leo Robson, reviewed
Mourning the loss of their parents, two brothers succumb to listlessness and lethargy in a sweltering London gripped by Olympic fever
Tim Franks goes in search of what it means to be Jewish
In a thought-provoking family history, the BBC journalist addresses questions of identity – and to what extent we are products of our forebears
Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press
Two former Izvestiya journalists describe how all but the bravest in the media have crumpled under pressure to toe the Putinist line
The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success
The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim
The race against Hitler to build the first nuclear bomb
The bomb was necessary to the Allies, but still horrified those responsible for its development – many of them refugees from Nazism
‘Too bohemian for Bournemouth’: the young Lawrence Durrell
Begged by his mother to go somewhere his behaviour wouldn’t ‘show so much’, the future novelist, aged 19, embarked on a lifetime of travel and rarely visited Britain again
What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition
The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire
