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CIA spies lose faith

With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The Estonian capital of Tallinn crawled with Russian money-changers (‘Comrade, we do deal?’). The television in my hotel room was detuned from capitalist Finnish to Soviet channels, but I was able to pick up Miami Vice

A complex creation myth: Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth, reviewed

‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named el supplies several stream-of-consciousness paragraphs about a ritual dance featuring ‘big Birds runnin round Pole and fyr and mam and mother and all womyn and these big things all hummin’. Dystopian, or by the time

Geology’s dry, rocky road

There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it be poeticised? Has the oh-my-oh-me-ism of recent nature books got out of hand? Can one not see a blackbird now without considering the nature of consciousness and the tragedy of existence? In short, shouldn’t the

When poison is the cure: examining today’s processed meat

Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich? is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was first published in France in 2017 as Cochonneries, a play on words that better reflects the nuanced nature of his argument. Cochonnerie means rubbish, or junk. Derived from cochon — pig — it’s a

A Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy in Uttar Pradesh

In the early hours of 28 May 2014 the bodies of two young girls were found hanging from the branches of a mango tree in the small village of Katra in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Their deaths caused outrage locally and attracted attention worldwide, as domestic and foreign media descended on Katra, the

Gabriel Matzneff: the paedophile who hid in plain sight

Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs with young girls and his travels to the Philippines in search of pre-pubescent boys — insert Gallic shrug here — but he still won literary prizes and enjoyed a state stipend. He was celebrated by