More from Books

The pleasures – and perils – of getting on your bike

Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’. He has been ‘rear-ended’ and ‘doored’ several times. He quotes an unnamed cyclist who likens the click of a car door being opened to the sound of a gun being cocked. ‘Get a bicycle,’ said

The lost world of the Karoo

Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip to South Africa was cut short by the sudden emergence of Covid, to March last year. Blackburn had gone to Cape Town, and then into the dry interior, the Karoo, to explore the lost world

Is self-loathing the British disease?

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left suddenly finding all sorts of reasons why only the UK – ‘a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island’ according to Emma Thompson, patron of the Refugee Council – would do as a final destination for these

When did cheerfulness get so miserable?

We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen’. As Timothy Hampton grasps, enforced cheeriness feels about as much fun as compulsory games. His invigorating book about the quest for true cheerfulness in literature and philosophy dismantles the various ‘prosthetic or counterfeit’ versions

The folly of garden cities

In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with an actor who’d bought a house in Finlay Street, Fulham for £15,000. Osborne, having lived on the same street in the 1930s when properties there changed hands for £300, was astonished by the sum. Yet,

A child’s-eye view of the not-so-good life

Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for well-crafted plots exploring isolation, shame and troubled families. In Amy and Lan, she sticks with some similar themes but shakes things up by using two child narrators to tell their own stories. As the seasons

A frictionless history of fieldwork: In Search of Us reviewed

To be an anthropologist today is to understand, as few in the secular modern university can, what it is to be marked by a consciousness of original sin. Contemporary ethnographies are full of passionate mea culpas from scholars concerned that they have inherited the guilt of their discipline’s founding fathers, men who inhabited a world

Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po

It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length – but the Po has always exerted a fertile grip on the Italian imagination. Virgil called it ‘the king of rivers’; Dante died in its marsh estuary, having earlier described in Purgatorio how Jacopo del

Martin Vander Weyer

Spikes and stagnant growth: why we are where we are

We live in discombobulating times, economically speaking. We know we’re descending into the highest inflation for half a century and an almost certain recession. But we don’t know quite how painful it’s going to be and we don’t know how to apportion blame between bad decisions and ‘black swans’. Clearly the coming train crash has

The forgotten heroines of the Middle Ages

Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village in rural Normandy and moved to Paris, becoming the first member of his family to attend university. By his mid-twenties he had published three well-received autobiographical novels: about working-class machismo (The End of Eddy), his

David Patrikarakos

Putin’s mistake was to discard the velvet glove

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature of autocracy – and the West’s relationship to it. We kicked things off by trying to realise the Trotskyite dream of ushering in global democracy through the barrel of a gun. We wanted to bring