Book Reviews

Some years ago I participated in a late-night Radio 3 show on exploration and travel. When I left the studio with my fellow contributors, both distinguished explorers, we got lost in the bowels of Broadcasting House. Round and round the dimly lit corridors we trudged, and only after talk of bivouacking did we finally reach a lift and escape. Michael Bond, formerly the senior editor at New Scientist, has produced Wayfinding, an excellently researched popular science book which explains how people — including experienced travellers — get lost, and why some individuals have superior navigational skills than others. ‘Most importantly,’ he writes at the outset, ‘the book is about our

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe. In my experience, one of the best places to observe a wide variety of bilingual or multilingual individuals

Dear Life arrives at a time when the public appetite for the personal accounts of medical insiders shows no sign of abating, with scores of such books having been published in recent years. Their enduring popularity is often — and, arguably, best — characterised as a kind of literary fallout from a decade of austerity and the very public ire this has drawn from health professionals. Rachel Clarke’s 2017 debut, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor’s Story, was written partly as a response to the 2015 dispute between NHS junior doctors and the then health secretary Jeremy Hunt, as well as the general impact of austerity measures on

The latest competition asked for application letters for a job at No. 10 from a fictional character of your choice. This challenge was inspired by the PM’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings’s suggestion, in a recruitment ad, that the ideal candidate for one of the positions on offer might resemble ‘weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand “diviner” who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger’. The parade of hopeful candidates, in an entry that was competent if somewhat predictable, included George Smiley, Gregor Samsa, Bertie Wooster and Toad of Toad Hall, all of whom were pipped to the post by the

The latest competition asked for poems featuring one of T.S. Eliot’s practical cats getting to grips with the modern world. Your 21st-century reincarnations of Eliot’s felines (the poems were originally published in 1939 and inspired by the poet’s four-year-old godson, who invented the words ‘pollicle’ for dogs and ‘jellicle’ for cats) were terrific, making it especially difficult to decide on the winners. Some fine Macavitys narrowly missed the cut (take a bow, Nick Syrett, David Shields and Hamish Wilson), as did Bill Greenwell’s Jellicles and Brian Allgar’s Growltiger, the Tory Cat. This week’s top cats are printed below and pocket £35 each. Sylvia Fairley Bustopher Jones has firm flesh on

‘This is the West, Sir,’ says a reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ This is very much the advice that has applied to Calamity Jane over the years. She was the lover of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok, avenged herself on his killer and bore his secret love-child. She rode as a female army scout and served with Custer. She saved a runaway stagecoach from a Cheyenne war party and rode it safely into Deadwood. She earned her nickname after hauling one General Egan to safety after he was unhorsed in an ambush. She was a crack shot, a nurse to the