The chapter headings alone are enough to induce a panic attack: ‘Disrepair – how modern diets harm brain health in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood’; ‘How ultra-processed food hacks our brains’; ‘How solving the last crisis in the food system caused the current one’. It’s not a new thing for books examining our food system
Kitty’s Salon is the only English-language book about the eponymous wartime Berlin brothel, which was rigged with microphones and surveillance equipment by the SS to capture the secrets of foreign ambassadors, political rivals and high-ranking government officials. Led by ‘the man with the iron heart’, Reinhard Heydrich, it is one of the last Nazi operations
The Best Minds is a coruscating indictment of psychiatric services for psychotic patients in the US. It is also a moving and shocking account of the trajectory of Jonathan Rosen’s childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, struck in his youth by schizophrenia, and whose starry ascent through Yale law school to spokesman for stigmatised patients with
The Welsh Guardsman Simon Weston is the most recognisable face of the Falklands war. He was terribly burnt when the Guards were bombed while waiting on the RFA Sir Galahad on 8 June 1982. He later became a national figure, talking openly about the difficulties of recovery, and working for burns victims and injured veterans.
The year is 2011, and in Lviv, a city straddling the East and the West, ‘no fog had been thick enough to impede the last 20 years of Ukrainian capitalism’. On the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s death, a group of ageing hippies perform a bizarre ritual by a grave marked with his name. Alik and
The Imposters is Tom Rachman’s fifth book in just over a decade. It is also his best – full of twists and surprises. Each chapter follows a different individual and captures their life in just a few pages. Many of the characters then weave in and out of other chapters. As the book unfolds there
Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since
‘Now, what I want is Facts…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.’ When Dickens begins Hard Times with these words, spoken by the odious, square-faced Mr Gradgrind, we are left in no doubt that, for Dickens, an education should consist of
Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology. After the Black Death, a wave of memento
