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The Pinochet affair: the pursuit of a Chilean dictator

Calle Londres 38 is the address in Santiago of one of the notorious detention centres where the government of the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered its opponents after the military coup of 1973. This book is mainly about the international row that broke out between 1998 and 2000 when Pinochet, by then

Doctor, Doctor: the genesis of a national folk hero

John Higgs begins his foray into the long-standing BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who with a personal anecdote about going to the pub with Tom Baker, the notoriously bibulous actor who played the part of the Doctor from 1975 to 1981 – still longer than anyone else. For me, as for Higgs, Baker was

Tony Benn, bogeyman to some, beacon of hope and light to many

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter.

The Da Vinci world of known unknowns

When Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold in 2017 for $450 million it caused a sensation. Dismissed as an anonymous ‘wreck’ just 12 years before, it had become the single most expensive artwork ever to come to auction. Newspapers – goggle-eyed at the price – hailed the discovery of a ‘lost’ Leonardo. The Louvre

Murder she imagined: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami reviewed

‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote W.B. Yeats. In the near-future America imagined by Laila Lalami, culpability starts there, too. Charged with the prevention of potential crimes, the Risk Assessment Administration monitors not just every aspect of citizens’ behaviour but, via tiny ‘neuroprosthetics’, the hidden drives revealed in sleep. As an RAA agent insists: ‘Every murder

Heroes of the Norwegian resistance

Reading Robert Ferguson’s fascinating history of the experiences of the Norwegians during the five years of German occupation between 1940 and 1945 – a collage of resistance, collaboration and the grey areas in between – I was reminded of the remarks of two Norwegian nonagenarians. In 2011, I interviewed Gunnar Sonsteby, a hero of Norway’s

A meditation on the beauty of carbon

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One in which a magazine’s advice columnist ‘the Guru Brahmin’ (in fact ‘two gloomy men and a bright young secretary’) receives yet another letter from a compulsive nail-biter: ‘What did we advise her last time?’ Mr Slump, the chain-smoking drunk, asks. ‘Meditation on the Beautiful.’ ‘Well, tell

Deep mysteries: Twist, by Colum McCann, reviewed

On the first page of Colum McCann’s compelling novel Twist we meet the two leads: John A. Conway, who has disappeared, and Anthony Fennell, who’s trying to tell his story. They first met when Fennell, an Irish journalist, struggling novelist and occasional playwright, was commissioned by an online magazine to write about the fragile fibre-optic

Bringing modernism to the masses in 20th-century Britain

The second world war was won in the cafés of central Europe – the intellectual milieu that produced Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, and before them Albert Einstein. But even though America was an alluring destination, many of the 1930s escapees from Nazism ended up in Britain. There were scientists in their number,

The story of Noah’s flood will never go out of fashion

‘They put the behemoths in the hold along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast, but you can imagine the stench.’ So begins Julian Barnes’s quirky novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, through which the story of Noah and the flood

Fight or flight?: 33 Place Brugmann, by Alice Austen, reviewed

In May 1940, as the Nazis invade Belgium, the residents of a sedate apartment block in Place Brugmann, Brussels, wake to find that their longtime neighbours, the Raphaëls, have disappeared. Alice Austen uses this moment as the starting point for her subtle debut novel about how a diverse group of Belgians react to the Nazi

Olivia Potts

Why are we routinely buying disgusting bread in Britain?

‘Bread is simple. Or is it?’ That is the question David Wright poses about a keystone food that spans the globe and the whole of history. Breaking Bread examines the science behind the ur-loaf, the development of the Chorleywood method, the economics of selling the stuff, the role that it has played in religion and

The danger of becoming a ‘professional survivor’

It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of

The sickness at the heart of boxing

There is a lot of death in the latest, and potentially last, book on boxing by the South African journalist Donald McRae. In less than two years he loses his sister, both his parents and his mother-in-law. To cope with the trauma he returns to the sport that has sustained his life and work for