theft
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
Would you steal from a restaurant?
‘You wouldn’t steal a car…’ began the early noughties anti-piracy video. ‘You wouldn’t steal a television… You wouldn’t steal a…
Uncomfortable truths about the siege of Leningrad
The legend of heroic resistance during the 872-day blockade helped many survivors bear the guilt of having robbed, betrayed, murdered and even eaten their fellow citizens
A choice of thrillers for end of summer escapism
Charlotte Philby’s appropriately titled The End of Summer skilfully explores the strains of a double life. Also reviewed: Ajay Close, Charlotte Vassell and Giuseppe Miale di Mauro
Conning the booktrade connoisseurs
Fuelled by loathing and resentment, Thomas James Wise set about defrauding as many privileged bibliophiles as he could – only to be rumbled by two of their number
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
George Osborne’s midlife crisis
There should be a term in anthropology for what happens to a certain type of Tory male in middle age.…
A nasty piece of work
Moving among the rich of Long Island, an upmarket prostitute grows increasingly desperate as her many misdemeanours are exposed
How you can tell the gender of a thief
My attempt at being Columbo was only taking me so far. In solving the mystery of who raided the barn,…
On Moses’s mountain
A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim…
Who steals books?
At my shop, it seems to be everyone from students to organised professional gangs
A new track record
Simon Bradley dates the demise of the on-board meal service to 1962, when Pullman services no longer offered croutons with…
No accounting for greed
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs:…
Why a trillion dollars of dividends is a milestone worth celebrating
Dividends paid by listed companies around the world passed $1 trillion for the first time last year, we learn from…
