Books

Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?

14 June 2025 9:00 am

What to hold on to and what to let go of is Samantha Ellis’s dilemma when trying to explain the complexities of their Judeo-Iraqi heritage to her young son

No escaping mother: Lili is Crying, bv Hélène Bessette, reviewed

14 June 2025 9:00 am

A daughter longs to flee her parent’s boarding house in 1930s Provence, but her bid for independence fails in a story of thwarted love and shattered dreams

Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Animism, divination and shape-shifting witchcraft continued to be powerful forces in the Baltic long after the conversion of Europe to Christianity

Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Vuong’s disparate characters in rural Connecticut, including a Lithuanian octogenarian and her teenage Vietnamese carer, find fulfilment not in achievements but in loving companionship

Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination

The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed

14 June 2025 9:00 am

The voice of teenage Edith caring for her pregnant sister in Italy alternates with that of her elderly self in contemporary Ireland in a story of identity, belonging and consent

The titans who shaped Test cricket

14 June 2025 9:00 am

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all…

Who started the Cold War?

14 June 2025 9:00 am

It was America, with its decision to build a global liberal order – not the Soviet Union, with plans to spread communism in Europe, argues Vladislav Zubok

The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability

14 June 2025 9:00 am

The more complex the infrastructure, the more liable it is to break down – as was recently apparent in the blackout that brought Madrid and Lisbon to a standstill in April

A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists

14 June 2025 9:00 am

The intimate of writers, politicians and royalty, Benson confined his waspish anecdotes to journals kept over a period of 40 years, now available in a magnificent two-volume edition

Admirable in their awfulness – the siblings Gus and Gwen John

14 June 2025 9:00 am

The self-styled Gypsy King and his reclusive sister seemed polar opposites – but both painters were selfish, obsessive monsters, according to Judith Mackrell

Edge of your seat

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Great news for admirers of entertaining and refreshingly honest thinking and writing about our world: a bonus volume by the…

A searching question: Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, reviewed

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Can the mysterious disappearance of a hiker on the Appalachian Trail be linked to a Department of Defense training facility in backwoods Maine?

Church teaching on homosexuality can be revised

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Lamorna Ash devotes much space to interviewing gay Christians seared by homophobia, but neglects scripture’s underlying message about the link between sex and loving commitment

Nunc est bibendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Peter Stothard’s portrait of an ambitious young Lothario running wild and refusing to knuckle down is certainly not the Horace we know from Latin lessons

An ill wind: Poppyland, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Norfolk life looks quietly bleak in these carefully worked short stories of broken homes, precarious employment, dwindling expectations and torpor

With many despairing academics packing it in, who will solve the problem of the universities?

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Something is seriously amiss when such a courageous and independent-minded professor as Matt Goodwin feels he no longer belongs in the system

No place is safe: The Brittle Age, by Donatella di Pietrantonio, reviewed

7 June 2025 9:00 am

When her daughter, a student in Milan, is left traumatised after being mugged, Lucia is reminded of her own violent introduction to adulthood at a similar ‘brittle age’

Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Iain MacGregor’s impeccably researched account of the first use of nuclear weapons in war is a timely reminder of the horrors they unleash on the world

Everyone who was anyone in Russia was spied on – including Stalin

7 June 2025 9:00 am

In 1972,Vasili Mitrokhin oversaw the transfer of thousands of documents in the KGB archives and secretly noted the atrocities they revealed - though Stalin’s file was mysteriously empty

What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens

7 June 2025 9:00 am

It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books

Charles Darwin’s contribution to Patagonia’s grim history

7 June 2025 9:00 am

Characterising native tribes as ‘naked, painted, shivering, hideous savages’ proved no less calamitous for their survival as Argentina’s efforts to exterminate them, says Matthew Carr

The all-seeing AI

31 May 2025 9:00 am

Artificial intelligence has overturned many of the old rules, and the one about ‘seeing is believing’ was perhaps the first…

Repetitive strain: On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II, by Solvej Balle, reviewed

31 May 2025 9:00 am

In an astonishing multi-volume novel where the unthinkable becomes entirely credible, Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller, finds herself trapped in one remorselessly recurring November day

Douglas Cooper – a complex character with a passion for Cubism

31 May 2025 9:00 am

Prone to paranoia and tantrums, the critic and collector made many enemies, but his firsthand knowledge of Léger, Picasso and Braque also won the admiration of art historians