Books

More from Books

Titanic mistakes

There is nothing quite like a good centenary to remind us how surprising it is that anyone got out of the 20th century in one piece. In the space of a few weeks this spring will be the 100th anniversaries of the Titanic and Captain Scott’s death, and from then on it’s going to be

More big questions

There is something rather odd about the current state of science. The funding for its prestigious institutions and mega projects now routinely runs to hundreds of millions, even billions, of pounds. And it is certainly productive, generating a tidal wave of papers every year published in its 25,000 academic journals. But ask what it all

A waist of shame

Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with one in four adults now clinically obese. A friend who works in orthopaedic surgery tells me that at least 80 per cent of knee replacements are, effectively, self-induced: caused by patients being overweight. Same with hips. Another friend, a consultant, had a complaint lodged against him

Chaps v. Japs

Does anyone do derring-do anymore? Here’s the real thing. On Christmas Day 1941, despite Churchill’s call to fight to the last man, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, the first British possession to surrender since the American War of Independence. Within a few hours, Chiang Kai-shek’s main official in the colony, the one-legged Admiral Chan

The past is another city

This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense

A horrid story of intellectual corruption

The death of a great author often causes interminable displays of corrosive envy. Heirs, acolytes, interpreters and academics resent one another’s claims on the literary estate or cultural heritage. They try to engross the dead talent for their own. They claim privileges, and make spiteful stabs at people with whom they have the closest affinities.

A real-life whodunnit

The Saville Report into the events of Bloody Sunday is ten volumes or 5,000 pages long and was five years in the writing. The inquiry lasted 12 years, including those five years, and cost the taxpayer £200 million. Some 2,500 people gave evidence, nearly 1,000 of whom gave oral witness. It was set up under

Journal of a disappointed man

Simon Goldhill introduces his new book by recalling a lunch with his editor, who suggested he make a pilgrimage and write about it. Pilgrimages, he reflected, tend to be made alone, but he is gregarious, so decided that he needed to make up, with his wife and another couple, ‘a party of four Jews’, to

Bookends: The year of living dangerously

Most people who recall 1976 do so for its appallingly hot summer, when parks turned brown and roads melted. Some will also remember that the celebrity culture throve then as now and that none was more celebrated than James Hunt, Formula One world champion. He was even more celebrated than that most famous soap opera,