#BookReViewS

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Hermione Hoby on Harriet Clark’s The Hill, Avi Shlaim on Omer Bartov’s Israel: What Went Wrong, Parul Sehgal on Gisèle Pelicot’s A Hymn to Li…

“For Heaven’s sake,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in an essay called “Letter to a Young Poet”, “publish nothing before you are 30.” This is such good advice that it should be tattooed inside the eyelids of e

While we cannot be certain that the implied double meaning in the title of Charles Darwin’s 1871 masterpiece, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, was deliberate, it would be remarkab

One of the last great moments on the old algorithmic agora of Twitter, not long before it became the proprietary far-right organising tool “X”, was the Parliaments World Cup, a knockout competition. T

Whenever the British look abroad for inspiration, I think of fish. The “Michigan fish test” in 2001 found striking differences in the interpretations by participants from Japan and the US of an animat

The phrase “cultural Marxism” has a convoluted history. Its origins arguably go back a century, to when the Nazis spoke of “Judaeo-Bolshevism” and “cultural Bolshevism” to cast communism as a Jewish c

Stephen King, 78, is the pre-eminent horror writer of our time: he is reputed to have sold more than 400 million books worldwide. Not since Charles Dickens has a storyteller held so many readers spell

John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, and Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Br…

The English have always seen cricket as representing their country more than any other sport. Neville Cardus, the doyen of cricket writers, famously said: “If everything else in this nation of ours we

One of the most pressing concerns after the First World War was the problem of “surplus women”. The census of 1921 confirmed the numbers: there were almost two million of them, creating “a question so

Predicting political futures is hard. When Keir Starmer won the 2024 general election, I was pleased. I was also worried about my professional future. Months stretched ahead, then years, of colourless

For the past month, I have been focusing on my work, which involves organising book launches and literary parties as part of Soho Reading Series (hosted across London). This dominates my life at the e

Labour’s problem is the numbers. In 1974, 65 per cent of the British electorate were working class (C2DE) and the remaining 35 per cent upper and middle (ABC1). In that year’s October general election

W hen JG Ballard died in 2009, aged 78, the broad outlines of his life were well known. He had published two autobiographical novels – the bestselling Empire of the Sun (1984), which draws on his teen

The protagonist of The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout’s 11th novel, is a 57-year-old high-school history teacher named Artie Dam. On the face of it, Artie has a supportive wife, friends, and is

It’s an atmospheric kind of job, caring for very old books. Wreathed in the druidical fog of time, manuscript keepers on TV and in movies guard secret knowledge. In reality, in my experience, experts

Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism, and Jayne Anne Phillips Small Town Girls all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you…

Our favorite criticism of the week includes Matt McManus on Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism, Katie Kitamura on Sophie Mackintosh’s Permanence, Chris Vognar on Craig Fehrman&#8…

Maria Semple’s Go Gentle, Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House, Antony Beevor’s Rasputin, and Lena Dunham’s Famesick all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brou…