Books

Lead book review

Sam Leith

Glorious Misadventures, by Owen Mathews – review

So: Russia’s imperial possessions on the Pacific North West of America. Remember those? No. Me neither. Something vague about the Russians flogging a bit of Alaska to the United States in the middle of the 19th century perhaps. But until I’d read this book I didn’t know that at one point Continental Russian America, not

More from Books

Birds & People, by Mark Cocker – review

‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow Country, in Birds & People he embraces the planet, with the help of the wildlife photographer, David Tipling, and the ‘650 contributors from 81 countries’ to whom the book is dedicated. He begins his cultural

Magic, by Ricky Jay – review

People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year. If, by chance, you are looking for a book that will both give you a hernia and teach you how to make a bridge disappear, this could be just the thing for you. The motorbike

Empire of the Deep, by Ben Wilson – review

‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious: the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest praise or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible.’ Thus wrote the 22-year-old Charles Darwin of Robert Fitzroy, the 26-year-old

The Ghosts of Happy Valley, by Juliet Barnes – review

Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came from Kenya, he quipped, ‘Ah, still living in Happy Valley?’ We will never shake it off, this idea of a Happy Valley in the equatorial highlands where aristocrats supposedly indulged in orgies and drugs —

A Slap in the Face, by William B. irvine – review

A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to detail is bordering on the obsessive’. Aside from observing that an obsessive attention to detail might serve the health service well, this is an example of the kind of insult that Professor Irvine would ascribe

Shire, by Ali Smith – review

Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is a wonderfully unexpected writer. In the first story, ‘The Beholder’, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a patient develops a growth on her chest — ‘woody, dark browny, greeny, sort-of circular,

The Son, by Philipp Meyer – review

Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of Texas, wrested from Mexico in 1836, Eli has miraculously reached the age of 100. Captured by Comanche Indians in boyhood, he mastered their survival skills, and was well on the way to becoming the most