Book review
Martin Amis: 1949-2023
Over the next few days, people will be reaching for certain set phrases about Martin Amis. That he was ‘era-defining’…
Is your baby racist?
Babies, look at them: waddling about the place, falling over, crying, needy. Those racist bastards. Yeah that’s right, you heard…
Umberto Eco really tries our patience
Colonna, the protagonist of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, is the first to admit he is a loser. A middle-aged literary…
Designing the swimming car, the Doodlebug and the Panzer tank was all in a day’s work for Ferdinand Porsche
The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers.…
The politics of prediction
Forecasts have been fundamental to mankind’s journey from a small tribe on the African savannah to a species that can…
What is written down
Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than…
To wit, deWitt
Patrick deWitt is a Canadian writer whose second novel, a picaresque and darkly comic western called The Sisters Brothers, was…
Lover and fighter
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor…
Bard times
It is fair to say that Jeanette Winterson is not Shakespeare, though I cannot imagine why any authors would accept…
Two serious ladies
‘You understand, Lenú, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.’ The…
Poet as predator
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Love it or loathe it
At the heart of the eschatological ideology of the Islamic State is the belief that when the world ends (and…
The raffish toff with a winning Formula
Max Mosley’s autobiography has been much anticipated: by the motor racing world, by the writers and readers of tabloid newspapers,…
The wandering Jew
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…
Walking the same walk
Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People,…
Shades of the classroom
How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s…
Poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
Into the badlands
Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and…
Goodbye to all that
In the latest – and best – of the books on the end of the USSR, Victor Sebestyen finds that the only good thing about the Soviet empire was the manner of its passing
How to read well
What the title promises is not found inside. It is a tease. John Sutherland says he has ‘been paid one…
The lure of Europe
A tour of the Continent was a prerequisite for young Jacobean noblemen training for statesmanship — provided they resisted its corrupting influence, says Blair Worden
More blood and mud
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the…
A dangerous heroine addiction
This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and…
At home with the Bloomsberries
Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…
‘The most important Jewish writer since Kafka’
Ian Thomson on the turbulent life of Clarice Lispector
