Plague

Behold rat. Behold the magnificent, clever creature as it runs from the bin you have just opened or disappears into the nearest bush. Behold rat as it is cut open or drugged or injected to improve your health in the name of science, as many millions of its peers have been. Behold rat – though you may find that tricky, because the old adage that you are never more than six feet away from a rat is comprehensively skewered in this wonderful, charming book. Wonderful? Charming? Rats? Yes. Even Joe Shute, a man scared of the creatures, bravely takes two four-inch baby rats into his house and slowly grows to

When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising until it spills over the lip and onto the stove. In Best of Friends, the author’s seventh novel, the tension is still there, but the bubbles are contained. It’s more of a simmer, gentle but insistent – not unlike the ‘shared subtexts’ that pass between the protagonists. We first meet Maryam and Zahra as 14-year-olds. It’s the summer of 1988 in Karachi and the two girls are preoccupied with standard teenage stuff (budding bodies, boys) and the kind of concerns that sadly become standard when living under a ‘repellent dictator’

Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses, the hedgerows and footpaths – much of this has been preserved for centuries. However, as Matthew Green argues in Shadowlands, there is also a history of lost towns and abandoned villages hidden beneath the tranquil surface. His book tells the stories of eight such places, as well as the disasters that led to their disappearance, offering a phantom history of Britain through vanished settlements and forgotten occupants. Shadowlands begins with the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney that was buried in sand several thousand years ago. It ends with

What just happened? Some 15 months after the pandemic first struck, it’s still horribly unclear, which is perhaps why there have been no decent books making sense of Covid-19. This is not just about a virus but a collision of politics, panic, digital media, human behaviour and incompetence. Niall Ferguson’s Doom looks at each of these aspects, putting them into historical perspective in a book of dazzling range and rigour. He offers several answers — and none of them is comforting. For most of human history, viruses were unexceptional — hard to research, because no one thought them remarkable. When plagues struck in the Middle Ages, we’d rush into quarantine,

Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for the city, during the most explosively expansive phase in its growth, also experienced the arrival of two of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse — war and pestilence — riding in to wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale. The 17th-century city may have narrowly escaped conquest and famine, but another Apocalyptic outrider — fire — also visited in 1666, leaving medieval London, with its filthy warren of narrow, timbered streets, in ashes. The upside, as Margarette Lincoln demonstrates, was that the cleansing inferno cleared the ground for London to become,

The subjugation of nature has formed a cornerstone of the human agenda. How surprising and humbling, then, to find our way of life so rapidly and unexpectedly undermined by a biological force that transcends identity and culture. Still worse, when we discover that the source of this chaos is a sub-microscopic viral particle whose genetic code — simpler than a bacterium — is barely compatible with a living entity. Yet it has brought global civilisation to a standstill. The stark and poetic prose of Paolo Giordano’s essay How Contagion Works conveys the existential angst of an Italian intellectual as he comes to terms with quarantine: the vulnerabilities, missed opportunities, loneliness,