It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a masterclass in the practice of history’ — is as good a description of this brilliant new biography of Charlemagne as we are likely to get. The broader contours of the life will be familiar to
Now, how shall I start this review? I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.) I loved this book, I really did. (Too rushed.) I loved this book: I really did. (Too planned.) I loved this book — I really did. (Too afterthoughty.) I loved this book… I really did. (Too uncertain.) I loved
It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around me converse. Some would express themselves in a personal language of grunts and clicks; others would be monosyllabically gnomic; and others would make of English new and magical shapes. They’d enrapture the language (especially in
The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.’ Inspired by Gay Talese’s 1980 reportage on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Lisa Taddeo, a journalist and Pushcart prize-winning short story writer, peered into the windows
Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People, too, are at the mercy of the Memory Police, an efficient lot hunting for those who can’t shake off their memories. Each disappearance involves not just getting rid of the physical object, but also of
Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her first book in 1966. Since then she has written several dozen studies, many of them about surrealism or modernism; others with such varied subjects as the women of Bloomsbury, Robert Motherwell, Blaise Pascal, Provençal cooking,
Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat and boring’ had given him five quid. Yet these million acres of water-logged land making their way from Lincolnshire through Norfolk and towards Cambridge have one quality that makes them irresistible to archaeologists like him.
No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive is clear and strong, even when the progression to the fatal blow can be analysed step by step, all that is left amid the eviscerated lives of loved ones is an emptiness around the violence
Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The Tiger Who Came to Tea, published in 1968 — and ended with a bunny, The Curse of the School Rabbit, before she died three months ago. Both books are pitch-perfect little masterpieces of their kind.
On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be home, I thought, trailing the coat as it became heavy with rain.’ The walk was longer than he expected, or the rain heavier. He arrived back soaked through and fell ill with pneumonia. The journey
