One of the most striking, and lowering, aspects of lockdown has been the deprivation of human exchange, and especially conversation. We can talk to our immediate families but not properly to a wider range of humanity. The Zoom chat, with so many ordinary conversational features removed, is not the same thing at all. Conversation is
Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until I read November 1918 it hadn’t to me. Now I know that between May and June that year, as German forces moved to within artillery range of Paris, a million of Ludendorff’s troops, half-starved owing
On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners died in a subterranean fire. Only no one is quite sure of the exact number because melted corpses are difficult to count. Nor is there any clarity on when the fire started or what caused
In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life: Come all you brave boys, whose courage is bold, Will you venture with me, I’ll glut you with gold?Make haste unto Corona, a ship you will findThat’s called the Fancy, will pleasure your mind. In a week-long orgy of savagery, women flung themselves
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless simplicity but an undertow of melancholy that can be personal (bad love affairs, damaged families) or institutional (the death of old Hollywood, the birth of the new) or, best of all, both entwined. It is
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not one of them. Mazur is out to muddy time’s waters, dismantling the easy opposition between clock time and mental time, between physics and philosophy, between science and feeling. That split made little sense even in
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one of the first books I ever reviewed, and I’ve kept tabs on his career ever since, in that spirit of comradely competitiveness one feels for a writer of a similar age launching at the same
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a hand of poker in her life. She has read, re-read, dissected and annotated poker textbooks. She has scribbled notes while trying to keep up with her power-walking mentor, the poker legend Erik Seidel, as he
Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating into biographies and memoirs as never before, scouring them for accounts of incarceration, illness, boredom, family meltdowns and sudden financial freefalls. One of the pleasures of the genre is the way in which the peaks
