The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature, one of the murderer’s descendants has his arm ripped from its socket by a young warrior who celebrates his gruesome victory by drinking himself blotto; the next day, our hero wakes up (not hungover, apparently)
Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as our own faces; there is only one definitive map, surely? Not according to Joanne Parker, whose Britannia Obscura aims to tease out less corporeal cartography. Hers are not quite ‘maps of the mind’, for they
Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his
Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs: ‘Long before this, though, and long before I learned that the insane, these days, might disguise themselves as money experts, I had heard that no one had met a sane accountant.’ To which an accountant
Before I read this book, I imagined the immune system as a defensive force, like the Germans on the beaches at Normandy on June 6 1944. When you’re young and vital, your immune system is the Germans in the early morning — scanning the horizon for movement, with plenty of ammunition in reserve. But life
Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine
The people behind the people are the ones to watch for, and we have all been waiting for a book by Anna Jones. Who? Well, if you are a fan of Jamie Oliver, you will have read a lot of Jones. For seven years she worked as his ‘stylist, writer and food creative,’ which means,
On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a performance of Mahler’s Third. The next night he went to see Jimi Hendrix play Madison Square Gardens. And there you have him. Was Bernstein a fragile romantic or a firebrand rocker? Was he the spiritual
Paul Fournel is a novelist, former publisher and French cultural attaché in London, and the provisionally definitive secretary and president of the select literary collective known as Oulipo, whose fellows have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Members of Oulipo remain members after their deaths. In this respect, it is the French literary
Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic white Doric columns and gold-encrusted ‘caskets’ are like a poor man’s dream of heaven. The dwindling belief in an afterlife — the consolation that we might ever join our loved ones — has taken much
Bitcoins are digital money ‘mined’ from satanically difficult mathematical problems. Madness, obviously. But five years ago, while the rest of us were saying ‘Huh. Geeks. Money in cyberspace’, or ‘Y’what?’ a young doctor I know bought a few quids’ worth for fun. Sold it later for £800. Now she’s out on a hillside in the
You might be forgiven for thinking that there is no need for yet another book about Margot Asquith. Her War Diary was published only a few months ago: surely we have had enough about this woman, extraordinary though she was. Anne de Courcy’s new book shows that this is not the case at all. Instead
And when I landed in America, aged ten, I knew the language was the same. And yet At once the alien words confronted me Like tests I must perform before I passed: Gotten and cootie and the way they said ’erb, and the different gas, and turning on The faucet. That first Christmas, presents wrapped
On the surface Harraga is the story of two ill-matched women colliding dramatically, with life-changing consequences. What emerges, in throwaway fragments, is a picture of Algeria’s chequered past and present; a history of conquest and occupation. It’s a sugar-coated pill with a burning, bitter core. Boualem Sansal is an Algerian writer recently nominated for the
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me to cut to the chase and just recommend some children’s books, but bear with me. I’m on the case. My campaign is to have pictures in books again. Adult books too, but obviously books for
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology and the link between Darwinism and psychoanalytic theory. She was a pioneer of play therapy for children, and the first hospitalised psychiatric patient to progress to practising psycho-analysis. She worked with, among others, Freud, Jung
‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the fullest, and I had a good time doin’ it. And I ain’t never wanted to be no teddy bear.’ Jerry Lee Lewis is still recording and performing at the age of 79, but his legend
Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t just a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that.’ But as David Goldblatt shows in this penetrating study, it was a sport then in apparently terminal decline.The deaths in the next
Quick-flowing creamy light and all cohering: Faux fanes in gardens, Nash and Wesley’s shades, Gold, gaily weighty houses, rocketing sky, And open hillside turning as I turn, All witnessed through ancestral engineering, Small canny bones and inward fine parades We had no part in, choiceless ear and eye Meting out pleasure I could never earn.
In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance as well as tickets. There were no onboard toilets until the 1890s, meaning that passengers either had to cross their legs or buy a ‘secret travelling lavatory’, consisting of a rubber tube and bag hidden